John Battelle, Federated Media's founder, has several reasons for hoping that Microsoft's "people-ready" campaign, and the attendant controversy, will fade away quickly. First of all, some of his affiliate publishers, such as Gigaom's Om Malik, have realized they're not comfortable endorsing marketers' slogans, even if the exercise is given the progressive-sounding name of "conversational marketing." The concept, to which Battelle has fixed his ad network's star, could quickly be seen as a fancy word for editorial corruption. But Battelle, the closest Silicon Valley gets to renaissance man, has more riding on conversational marketing than Federated's high-price ad campaigns for companies such as Microsoft and Cisco. The former Industry Standard founder -- author of The Search, a well-respected account of the rise of Google -- is working on a new book, on a revolutionary new paradigm of marketing. Battelle tells Valleywag he's still figuring out the book, but one title bandied around, we hear, is this: The Conversation.[IMG]http://feeds.gawker.com/~a/valleywag/full?i=xjXg4l[/IMG]
