Jim Kukral made a post today entitled “Ted Murphy Is a Fucking Evil Marketing Genius?“.  The question mark there is the best part of the post in my opinion.

Ted Murphy is the CEO of PayPerPost, which most of you are probably familiar with or either using by this point.  Of course PayPerPost’s business model is to allow bloggers to accept money for posts about companies.  Sounds simple and innocent, until you start considering the implications (and PayPerPost’s original policy of not requiring disclosure).

Jim is responding to a video entry from Loren Feldman at 1938 Media which covers Ted’s appearance at Canada’s Mesh Conference.  At the conference, Michael Arrington was the keynote and while acknowledging Murphy’s presence in the room described him as “the most evil person in the room.”  At the end of the video, Loren does a quick interview with Murphy and pals it up.

Jim writes:

I agree with Loren. Ted Murphy isn’t evil as Arrington says. In fact, if you read my blog, you’ll know that I turned my opinion on Ted a long time ago and proclaimed him a fucking marketing genius.

I won’t go so far as calling Murphy evil (this is about blogging after all), but I will take the opposing side along with the likes of Jason Calacanis who wrote in June of last year…

The currency of blogging is authenticity and trust… you pay folks to blog about a product and you compromise that.

Blogging as we once knew it (citizens expressing ideas and thoughts about things they were interested in or passionate about) is long over.  Blogging has become a business platform where we worry over SEO structures and linbaiting recipes.  Is your blog optimized?  Where is your sitemap??

It’s really a sad state of affairs.

However, I don’t think we need to return to some antediluvian state where blogs were untainted by the floods of money.  Blogging, as everything, is constantly changing and evolving and making grand judgments about tactics and strategies to artificially gain more eyeballs or traffic or money from one’s blog is a part of that evolving ecosystem.

In my opinion, PayPerPost is not evil, but just silly.  Why would I want to dilute my most intimate and personal online space with what equates to a BS review of something that I wouldn’t have written about otherwise?  I hate reading blogs that use PayPerPost or ReviewMe or whatever the flavor of the month is ,and I unsubscribe from blogs that come across my feed reader with paid reviews.  However, that’s just my own personal judgement.  Do what you want with your own intimate online space.

But going back to my main point, Ted Murphy is not a marketing genius.  Being a PR whore with a camera crew and master baiting A listers does not a marketing genius make.  Instead, Murphy understands that for the crowd his platform appeals to, any coverage (especially underdog us-against-the-world type psychological coverage) is good coverage.  It doesn’t take a genius to figure that out… it’s basic human sociology.

If Murphy were a genius, he would have figured out how to bridge the gap between monetization and responsibility.  Instead, he came out of the gates firing with a platform that didn’t require disclosure, appealed to the lowest common denominator and promised big money to amateurs (which is rarely the case).

Here is what Murphy wrote in the comments (#78) of the original TechCrunch post on PayPerPost…

Somebody finally gets it! You can do the same things you were already doing. Talk about the same stuff (and maybe find out about some other cool new things) and make money doing it. If you see something that isn’t right for you don’t blog about it.

That may have been the original intent, but that’s not how bloggers have been using the service.  Cheapening the medium of blogging by introducing the ability to make money on obvious artificial posts is not a genius move.

Marketing, at its foundation, is about sharing ideas with another person or a group of people.  Genius marketing is organic marketing.

Sorry, Jim… you’re wrong on this one.