The elephant in the room: observations on the Google vs. Sicko incident

(Edit: this post by Teresa Valdez Klein on the subject is also interesting.)

The tumult over the whole affair has been impossible to miss. A little over a week ago, Lauren Turner, a health care marketer at Google, wrote a blog entry in which she criticized Michael Moore’s new movie Sicko for its allegedly unfair depiction of health care companies. The piece was posted in Google’s new Health Advertising Blog and led to an outcry. Many in the blogosphere saw Turner’s recommendation to insurance companies – buy ads from Google to fix your image problems – as a sleazy and manipulative form of marketing (samples: this post by ZDNet’s Dan Farber and this bit by Mike Abundo calling for Turner to be fired). The company reacted with two meta posts, one by Turner, explaining that the views expressed in her initial post were purely her own and a second one in Google’s main corporate blog that also sought to douse the flames. Since the incident made Slashdot it can be considered a fairly bad moment for Google’s PR.

Most comments that I’ve read deal with the question of accountability – whose opinion is expressed in an official blog and where do we draw the line between personal opinion and the company’s official stance?

While I also want to deal with that question, my impression is that Turner’s (and thus Google’s) mistake is not firstly the opinion expressed in the post – that Sicko is biased and treats health care companies unfairly – but failing to understand the communicative situation in which the exchange takes place. Turner manifests a fairly stunning lack of knowledge and sensitivity when it comes to blog sociology and that is why the piece caused such an uproar.

Let me elaborate, using several quotes from the post:

Lights, camera, action: the healthcare industry is back in the spotlight. (Not that it ever left the stage.) Next week, Michael Moore’s documentary film, Sicko, will start playing in movie theaters across America.

 

The New York Times calls Sicko a “cinematic indictment of the American health care system.” The film is generating significant buzz and is sure to spur a lively conversation about health coverage, care, and quality in America. While legislators, litigators, and patient groups are growing excited, others among us are growing anxious. And why wouldn’t they? Moore attacks health insurers, health providers, and pharmaceutical companies by connecting them to isolated and emotional stories of the system at its worst. Moore’s film portrays the industry as money and marketing driven, and fails to show healthcare’s interest in patient well-being and care.

These are the first two paragraphs of Turner’s piece and careful reading quickly reveals several interesting things. Firstly, the style is very journalesque. The lights, camera, action-enumeration in the first sentence could also be from a movie review or some other traditional journalistic text type (e.g. an editorial).

A slight shift occurs with the first instance of a personal pronoun (us). While the referent of the pronoun is at least somewhat ambiguous, it appears to be what could be called the ‘universal we‘ that Turner uses – legislators, litigators, and patient groups are part of the American public, as are others among us. The referent of others is named a bit later: health insurers, health providers, and pharmaceutical companies are worried about the way the movie depicts them. The important detail here is that Turner does not place the two groups equally for away from herself. She could have simply written others are growing anxious or something similar, but by inserting among us she has placed herself (and arguably her employer) in direct proximity to her potential clients in the health care business. Of course that placement is quite deliberate – she wants to sell ads to these companies, after all – but it soon becomes clear why it is also highly problematic.

Sound familiar? Of course. The healthcare industry is no stranger to negative press. A drug may be a blockbuster one day and tolled as a public health concern the next. News reporters may focus on Pharma’s annual sales and its executives’ salaries while failing to share R&D costs. Or, as is often common, the media may use an isolated, heartbreaking, or sensationalist story to paint a picture of healthcare as a whole. With all the coverage, it’s a shame no one focuses on the industry’s numerous prescription programs, charity services, and philanthropy efforts.

I think you’ll agree that the entire paragraph is essentially a flowery declaration of love for the health care industry. Now, this isn’t surprising per se (again, this is a sales pitch), but the lack of balance is still noteworthy (the nasty press vs. the friendly insurance companies). But wait, there’s more.

Many of our clients face these issues; companies come to us hoping we can help them better manage their reputations through “Get the Facts” or issue management campaigns. Your brand or corporate site may already have these informational assets, but can users easily find them?

Note that here the pronominal references change. We becomes Google and the more distant our clients is replaced by you / your brand. Why is this significant?

Because the post starts out with no clear speaker and referent. There is no “I”, as in “I want to express my views on Sicko and the health care industry today” and no “you” as in “Dear John, how are you ?”. The latter -that there is no clear referent – is perfectly normal for a blog, but the former is unusual. More importantly, these roles are only clearly assigned in the last two paragraphs.

We can place text ads, video ads, and rich media ads in paid search results or in relevant websites within our ever-expanding content network. Whatever the problem, Google can act as a platform for educating the public and promoting your message. We help you connect your company’s assets while helping users find the information they seek.

The pronominal reference at this point is clearly we = Google, you = health care companies. In other words, this is a message from Google to companies in that industry and while other people may also be reading it they are of no concern to the author. When a third party is introduced into the text (the public, later users), it is treated as though it were not a part of the exchange. Apart from pronominal use there are other signature characteristics of the text type that Mrs. Turner had in mind when writing this: verbs such as act, educate, promote, connect and help are indicting, as is the need to tart up nouns adjectivally (relevant websites, ever-expanding content network etc).

If you’re interested in learning more about issue management campaigns or about how we can help your company better connect its assets online, email us. We’d love to hear from you! Setting up these campaigns is easy and we’re happy to share best practices.

This is the equivalent of telling Bob that you think Mary is fat… while she is standing next to you. The public that needs to be educated is the elephant in the room and it doesn’t like to be talked down to. Turner appears to be unaware of this however. She seems to either assume that only potential clients will read the blog and that her pitch will work with them, or (even worse) that the gullible and asinine public will read it but not be offended.

The moral of the story is simple: you should anticipate that your blog is a public forum, no matter how specialized and in-group it may seem. Corporate bloggers should also forget most of what they know about the language of marketing. Certain linguistic tropes (like the aforementioned super-dupering of products via excessive use of adjectives) are recognized immediately and have a lot of potential for negative interpretation.

Delivering a sales pitch like this through a blog is bad enough, priding yourself with how effectively your employer can manipulate the public opinion for the right price is… well, I believe in American English it is called effing stupid. The problem is further aggravated by the fact that Turner’s claim – this is my opinion, not Google’s – is extremely weak.

In all but the last sentence we is the personal pronoun of choice, and that we clearly refers to the company. Obviously, Google as a corporate entity cannot have an opinion, but what is posted in an official corporate blog will understandably be interpreted as noted and accepted by someone further up the ladder (and it seems unlikely that there was no monitoring in Turner’s case).

Not understanding blog stylistics is at least a part of Turner’s failure. She has applied a language common in one context to a completely different and inappropriate one and the result is a bit like someone telling a bad joke aloud at a funeral. Clarifying that your views are your own by using I instead of the collective company we is a decent start.