Bonum Certa Men Certa

Visible Technologies Funded by Former Microsoft People

May Also be Breaking British Laws That Forbid Buzz Marketing

Tin man
Bot-guided pseudo-opinions



Summary: Unethical marketing firm funded and run by Microsoft veterans, who are managing some of Microsoft's brands by intervening in social networks

YESTERDAY we wrote about Visible Technologies, which manages perceptions [1, 2] for Microsoft. We showed that there were many incidental connections between Microsoft and Visible Technologies at the business and staff level, but a financial relationship was not shown at the time. After some searching we managed to find who funded Visible Technologies when it was younger. It turns out that they are funded by ex-Microsoft staff via the Ignition shell that we wrote about before. It is filled with former Microsoft executives who give money strategically.



From the Seattle P-I:

Visible Technologies, which is announcing $12 million in venture funding Monday from Ignition Partners and WPP Group, is trying to solve that problem. The 4-year-old Seattle company's products not only allow clients to track conversations on blogs and news sites, but also actively participate in them.

[...]

As a result of the investment, Michelle Goldberg of Ignition Partners has joined the board.

Goldberg said that Visible has a compelling technology that helps companies manage their online reputations.


Michelle Goldberg used to be at Microsoft. The large majority of Ignition Partners is just Microsoft veterans. To the naked eye, however, the investment above would probably trigger no suspicion.

It did not take long for more Microsoft veterans to join this company which does the AstroTurf campaigns for Microsoft (where such practices, when used in a more political arena, are also causing trouble like war, global warming, and other travesties that promote or justify harm in exchange of money). Here is Visible Technologies and Microsoft exhibiting together like a couple:

Webcast with Visible Technologies and Microsoft



On Thursday May 22nd I'll be participating in a webcast with Blake Cahill from Visible Technologies and Marty Collins from Microsoft.


Visible Technologies has another site, called "VisInsights". It's like another identity, just like TruCast and TruPulse. "Another visible technologies site [is] trureputation.com," says Ryan. The "About" page of VisInsights says:

Visible Technologies LogoVisible Technologies is a leading provider of online brand management solutions for companies and individuals in today’s rapidly changing new media environment


The site contains big tags like "Brand Management" and "Reputation Management". They are also concerned about some of their practices seemingly becoming illegal here in the UK. Those British laws must be such a nuisance to them!

Buzz Marketing techniques to become illegal in UK?



[...]

I am not sure how this one slipped by me late last week but thought I would share the update from the IPA in the UK. Effective on the 26 of May 2008 certain activities will become a criminal offense when the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations becomes effective.

Seeding positive messages about a brand in a blog without making it clear that the message has been created by, or on behalf of, the brand will be an offense. Using “buzz marketing” specialists to communicate with potential customers in social situations without disclosing that they are acting as brand ambassadors will be an offense.


From the comment found here:

Last night I read an article in the Post Intelligencer about this company called (ironically) Visible Technologies that's in Seattle. Their whole job is to monitor comments about their corporate clients that show up on blogs, forums, etc., and report back so that the company can respond. I think 'anonymous' is a faceless man in a suit.


Based on the Seattle Times, Visible Technologies may leave no disclosures. Microsoft certainly does not [1, 2, 3]. Yesterday we quoted from the The Seattle Times the following: "Clients pick an “author” or opt for anonymity. Visible [Technologies] also has a virtual army — thousands of personas registered with online forums."

"So many to choose from," remarks Ryan, "I wonder how many postings on forums are the same person from Visible Technologies replying to themselves. As of August 2006, they only had 28 employees, so either they did some hiring or those 28 employees are each 10 different people on every forum they "monitor"."

Professor Walter Carl had something to say about such marketing techniques:

One of the age old debates by many who don't know much about Word of Mouth Marketing is the argument that it's okay to pay people to be a shill for a company. The problem is that many of them never reveal who they are working for. There's a good interview with Professor Walter Carl of Northeastern University on NPR. I recommend you give it a listen!


Here is an example of AstroTurfing gone bad. Visible Technologies is quoted in the article.

Marketing campaign sinks Cruise Critic



[...]

“People are looking to people online to validate a purchase,” says Blake Cahill, senior vice president of marketing at Visible Technologies, whose clients include Microsoft and Panasonic.


More insight comes from here where Visible Technologies gets mentioned:

Most social data aggregators (like TNS, who is great, along with many of their stellar competitors like Visible Technologies, Radian6 et al) usually apply sentiment scores using a mix of people and programs. Unless a live analyst (fluent btw in both the local language and vernacular) is making the decision about whether a post to a blog or a tweet or blip is positive, negative or neither/neutral, you should be very suspicious of the accuracy - and more importantly, actionability - of any "score".

And it gets expensive quickly asking a live analyst to manually read, assess and score hundreds of thousands of such posts or tweets. So we all rely on technology to help, and it's a great but not perfect science.

You can do like we do and create language cartridges specific to the product domain or category and that helps. Or have our social media analysts scan samplings of the machine scored outputs of our data aggregator partners and fine-tune the "sentiment scores" from this.


Some time ago, Visible Technologies hooked up with the Aberdeen Group to justify its practices, just like Microsoft's patent troll, Nathan Myhrvold, funded a so-called 'study' to justify his hoarding/trolling which harms everyone.

Companies are learning how to leverage social media and tap into the rising tide of consumers participating in social network sites, blogs, wikis and Twitter.

According to the “The ROI on Social Media Marketing” report from the Aberdeen Group, sponsored by Visible Technologies, marketers have developed the tools and methodologies to drive marketing ROI by listening to and learning from customers and prospects.


Visible Technologies' TruCast is also abused in other areas of society:

“some of them are fakes” … but that doesn’t stop MSNBC, CNN, and FOX from reporting the fake information as news… that should tell you something right there.

The way that is happening is they didn’t come out of Iran in the first place. A firm like Burson-Marsteller has been behind them from the beginning, using technology they readily advertise on their website called TRU-CAST (which basically means, in the new Orwellian Speak, “lying on the webcasts”). They’re “shaping” the story to help force a regime change in Iran through the use of social media site like FaceBook and TWITTER.

“The understanding of “sentiment” allows us to FOCUS THE MESSAGE in a way that traditional media would not allow us to do.” Visible Technologies talking about the tool Tru-Cast

[...]

TruCast (Visible Technologies): Burson-Marsteller partners with Visible Technologies to helps clients interact, manage and grow their brands in the blogosphere and social media communities. With TruCast, Burson-Marsteller clients gain the following benefits:

o Social Media and Blog Monitoring to track viral conversations about the client’s brand and products and to react quickly to online dialogues affecting the brand o Social Media Learning and Measurement to brand Influencers and activists, assess the conversation volume about your products and brand o Social Media Marketing and Customer Engagement to drive influential peer-to-peer, word-of-mouth promotion and measure marketing programs and media campaign success

[...]

“The Visible Technolgies “Tool-kit”, the Tru-Cast Platform, the “Engagement Console” enables us to actually ACTION that analysis, to LEVERAGE that insight. It enables us to participate in the conversations, to FOCUS OUR MESSAGING… to help us better target how we place our messaging


Some other names of companies that engage in similar practices can be found here: (we saw some before [1, 2])

Radian6 has many competitors like BuzzLogic, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, and Visible Technologies. Brogan argues that these services are too expensive, charging upwards of $50,000. Radian6 has some solutions that are as low as $500/month. The big difference, said Brogan, is with Radian6 you get the toolset, not just a report at the end of the month that tells you what’s happening. Other services may charge you for every requested change. Radian6 lets you change the terms and tweak until you see what you need to see.


Marketing firms go further than this and may even create fake blogs (or "flogs").

Whether it's creating a "flog," or posting a shill review on Amazon.com, many people have taken to using the Web to help shape opinion, while also obscuring their own identities.


There's this recent article from Business Week.

If "pay per post" lets online writers shill for cash, why not go all the way and sell real-life opinions, too?


Well, Microsoft has done that too. Microsoft bribed professors who mentioned its software. Here is Microsoft's Jon Udell speaking about Visible Technologies.

You could of course monitor those conversations using the existing suite of awareness tools: search, link aggregation, tag aggregation. But a new breed of power tools is emerging, and she’ll be using the ones provided by Visible Technologies.


It must be exciting for Microsoft to ponder these prospects. "Those kinds of people are the reason I turned on comment moderation for all comments," argues Ryan. "[The] default for WordPress is that after you approve one comment, anything else they post automatically gets added, so I had people make one innocent comment then spew a bunch of crap while I wasn't looking."

"Can’t you funnel this PR money into making your products not suck instead?"
      --Ryan
"Chris Pirillo is associated with them," he added. "Pirillo has been a Microsoft shill for a while. They send him Windows shirts and baseball hats and free copies of all their stuff. Pirillo blogs about them [there is a video there, too]. Good video, seems to explain what they do."

In his own blog, Ryan concludes as follows: "It’s getting to the point where the web is so deluged with astroturfing agencies like Visible Technologies that you can’t trust anything you read, which is their entire goal to begin with."

[...]

"If this page gets a hit from Visible Technologies or Microsoft, I’d like to say that instead of trying to yell over your critics, might I suggest actually fixing the very real defects in your products they’re complaining about?

"How much are you guys paying these people to do damage control for you after you turn our PCs into black boxes for the MPAA and decide to save $1 per unit on the XBOX 360 console by skimping on the cooling system leading to five times the failure rate of the PS3, and nearly ten times the failure rate of the Wii?

"Can’t you funnel this PR money into making your products not suck instead?"

"No other large companies as far as I know use their employees as attack dogs to silen[ce] dissent. It’s time for Microsoft to stop this nonsense."

--The Prickly Prince From Microsoft Strikes Again



Recent Techrights' Posts

Turns Out LLMs for Code Don't Save Time and Don't Improve Quality
Neither legal nor useful
 
Links 13/07/2025: Climate Crisis, GAFAM Poisoning the Water
Links for the day
The Microsofters Will Have an Obligation to Compensate Us
This story isn't just about Microsoft. It's also about corruption, there are many women victims, there is abject "abuse of process", and many more scandals to be illuminated in years to come.
Reproducing at the EPO Instead of Producing Monopolies for Foreign Monopolies With Their Price-Fixing Cartels
Does the EPO recognise the need of well-educated Europeans to bear kids?
Valnet Inc. Dominates Real (Not LLM Slop) GNU/Linux Coverage in 2025
And likely in prior years, too
Free Software Foundation (FSF) Fund Raiser Goes on
Later this month we'll expose another OSI scandal
EPO Staff Representatives Issue a Warning About Staff's Health and Inadequate Care
Even the EPO's own stakeholders (money sources) are openly protesting against what the EPO became
Links 13/07/2025: Partly Assorted News From Deutsche Welle and CBC
Links for the day
Gemini Links 13/07/2025: Board Games and Battle Styles
Gemini Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, July 12, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, July 12, 2025
Plunder at the Second-Largest Institution in Europe
cuts, neglect, health problems, even early deaths
Links 12/07/2025: Political Developments, Attack on Opposition, Climate Actions
Links for the day
Gemini Links 12/07/2025: Melodic Musings and Small Web July
Links for the day
Links 12/07/2025: Jail in China for Homoerotica, South Korea Discriminates Against Old Workers
Links for the day
If Only Everything Was Rewritten in Rust, We'd Have No More Security Issues?
Nope.
Links 12/07/2025: Birdwatching and Fake/Misleading Wall Street 'Valuation' Figures
Links for the day
Gemini Links 12/07/2025: How to Avoid Writing, Apps for Android
Links for the day
Using SLAPPs to Cover Up Sexual Abuse and Strangulation
The exact same legal team of the Serial Strangler from Microsoft and Garrett already has a history fighting against "metoo"
EPO Staff Committee on Harassment in the Workplace
slides
Adding the Voice of Writers to UK SLAPP Reform
The journey to repair antiquated (monarchy era) laws will likely be long
EPO Takes More Money From Staff for Speculation (Pensions), Actuarial Study Explains the Impact
"The key change in this year’s Actuarial Study, due to cascading the new “risk appetite” from the financial study, is a significant increase of the total pension contribution rate of 5.7 percentage points, up to a total of 37.8%. This is driven by an unprecedented decrease in the discount rate of 105 bps down to 2.2%."
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, July 11, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, July 11, 2025
Microsoft - Like IBM - Does the "Relocation" Tricks (Start Over Elsewhere, Then Get Sacked by Microsoft)
It is a "low blow" or a "dick move"
After the Free Software Foundation's Campaign to Raise Money Let's See Campaigns to Finish Off Microsoft (Vista 11, GitHub etc.)
Microsoft is in effect collapsing
Your Publications Have No Major Impact Unless or Until You "Get Some Heat"
we're on the right track
Slopwatch: A Cause for Hope, the Hype is Dying
For about a month we showed that becoming a slopfarm - for several weeks - resulted in utter failure and ruin for BetaNews
Links 11/07/2025: Censorship Worsening, 3D Printing Success Stories, UK and France Unite Around Nukes
Links for the day
Gemini Links 11/07/2025: Zorin OS and Scriptonite Updates
Links for the day
Links 11/07/2025: Hardware, Russia, and China
Links for the day
Links 11/07/2025: Intel Collapsing and Microsoft Resorts to Bribery to Push Slop Via Obligatory Education
Links for the day
The EFF Sided With the Team That Strangles Women and Tells Women to Kill Themselves
They say that apathy and inaction are a form of a "stance"
"Nat [Friedman] and [the Serial Strangler From Microsoft] Were Always Exceptionally Close," Says Former Housemate and Colleague
Now Alex (hiding behind another name when that suits him) not only attacks women but also people who merely report what he did to women
Exemplary List of Things That Are Not Artificial Intelligence or Even Intelligence
The "age of AI" or "era of AI" or "AI revolution" mostly boils down to rebranding, just like "the cloud"
New Letter From the European Patent Office Explains How the Office Plots to Grant Many Illegal Patents, a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of 'Growth'
Open letter to Mr Rowan (VP1) and Mr Aledo Lopez (COO)
Abuse of Process
5RB is employing people who help violent men
What Microsoft's Nat Friedman and Microsoft Lunduke Have in Common
"Get in da car; No time to explain, loser"
Microsoft and IBM Don't Have Much of a Future (They Mostly Pretend at This Point)
IBM and Microsoft are in some ways alike but in many ways different
It's Not Just Twitter (or X.com) That's Dying, Microsoft's Equivalent is Dying Also
Unable to find a business model
GitHub Copilot Can Cause the Bankruptcy of GitHub to Come Sooner and GitHub to be Shut Down Just Like Skype
Some publicly available information suggests that even for each paid subscriber for plagiarism (LLM 'coding') GitHub Copilot still loses more money than it makes
Wayland is Bad for the Planet
If you use Wayland, it'll take you longer to accomplish tasks and you will consume more energy (or battery life)
Legitimising Those Who Sabotage You
Microsoft is a very malicious company
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, July 10, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, July 10, 2025
On Microsoft Layoffs
we might be looking at about 60,000 Microsoft layoffs since 2023
EPO Management Already Breaks Its Own Promise (Lie) on "Bringing Teams Together"
This gut-punching move happened just 2 days ago
Gemini Links 11/07/2025: Occupation of 2025 and "Old Man Yells At Soundcloud"
Links for the day
Our Lawsuits Against the 'Cancel Mob' (Ringleaders) Helped Reduce Anti-Free Software Online Abuse
That's not to say that lawsuits are the best way to handle terrible people. But that can help.