examining the aftermath of the pop-pocalypse
Pepsi's presence on ScienceBlogs caused an extreme overreaction and revealed a major lack of foresight, but that doesn't mean it was a good idea in the first place.
Yesterday, as shock and outbursts of incandescent fury swept across ScienceBlogs, I tried to explain why all corporate ventures into science blogging are extremely likely to fail, especially efforts in which an existing mouthpiece for a corporation is simply transplanted into blogging networks not known for writers who go easy on things that irritate them. Now, with the PepsiCo blog killed after 11 out of the 85 blogs either decided on a hiatus in protest, or moved their posts altogether, according to Carl Zimmer's count, it may be a good idea to do a post-mortem on this fiasco to note what went wrong on both sides. While the bloggers had every last right to be shocked, offended and angry at the tone deaf management, in a number of cases, their animosity went way too far and encouraged a public backlash far more hostile and bitter than I would've ever expected.
Again, bringing over a softball blog with feel good stories about a company that primarily makes junk food and sugary soft drinks under the guise of "scientific blogging" is absurd and Adam Bly's justification of this idea in an e-mail about giving industry scientists a chance to speak seems like something he thought of at the very last minute, after Pepsi's check cleared and before he realized just how furious his bloggers were about their sudden association with a blog ran by PR flacks whose job is to make their employers look good and deflect any difficult or controversial questions. It's one thing when a corporation wants to talk about its work, inviting a few independent bloggers to manage the content of their little realm in a blog network, which is how Shell and GE handled their stay on Sb. But there's something fundamentally wrong when a fluffy corporate site is being transplanted into a new home and tries to mimic independent, personal content as closely as possible until a thunderous outcry floods the managers behind the decision to let it happen.
However, this doesn't justify the visceral reaction many ScienceBlogs residents had to Pepsi, diving into their less than pristine human rights and environmental records, their participation in industry groups which often publish misleading and biased studies, and accusing the company of making money off disgusting food that makes people sick and obese. Hundreds of their readers echoed the sentiments, flooding Pepsi's blog with torrents of charges and accusations, quite a few of which were laced with swearing, then complained that the comments they submitted were being moderated. Well duh! Your typical PR flack isn't going to be forgiving or accommodating to really hostile readers. And of course, the important question is how exactly does hurling a few f-bombs at Pepsi accomplish anything? How does it help the obese, or diabetics, or those who live in the developing world and deal with their water supplies being tapped by Coke and Pepsi? Corporations will use every possible loophole or trick to lower costs while increasing profits. Yelling at them isn't going to solve the problems they create. Only better regulation and more informed consumers will.
Oh, and speaking of health problems and pop, allow me to ask how many people are absolutely forced to buy the chips, dips, and carbonated, sugary beverages produced by PepsiCo? Your health is your responsibility, and while Pepsi probably isn't helping in this department, neither can you legitimately blame them for giving a person with a weight problem diabetes. You could buy decent food at your local grocery store without breaking the bank, eat smaller portions, avoid pop as much as you can, and take basic steps to stay active. Blaming a company for someone's extra pounds is just lazy from both intellectual, and rhetorical standpoints. Likewise, it's also ridiculous to expect random employees of a giant corporation to account for every unethical thing their employers have ever done. There's usually a very small group of executives in upper management who would decide to discard basic ethics and have the power to commit serious abuses, and they generally prefer to stay as far out of the spotlight as possible. Hollering at someone ten degrees removed from them in the hierarchy is just catharsis under the pretense of "trying to hold a multinational accountable for its actions."
On a final note, we should definitely mention what is likely to have caused the whole problem in the first place and trigger the Sodageddon. Money. Blogging, just like pretty much any venture based on free content usually don't make all that much money. Even when you add up your ad revenue shares and syndication fees (please note that this blog does receive some money for syndicating some of its content to certain news sites), you still have to keep your day job if you want to pay your bills. Pepsi was offering cash to a medium that's starved for this kind of income, and Bly jumped on the opportunity. Unfortunately, what this incident also shows is that he let his greed get the better of him and didn't think things through enough to realize that a corporate blog on a science blogging network is a recipe for disaster and quite a few very intense temper tantrums.
