[wordup] Microsoft funds "grass-roots" campaign again

[Adam Shand]

Actually this has been fairly standard practice for a while.  It even has
a name though I forget what it's called.  Mostly I've heard about this
practice in use by book publishers who get people to post "independant"
reviews to places like amazon.com to try and boost sales of their
books/cd's etc.

Via: Simon Horsburgh <simon.horsburgh at stonebow.otago.ac.nz>
More: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-082301micro.story

Lobbyists Tied to Microsoft Wrote Citizens' Letters
By JOSEPH MENN and EDMUND SANDERS
Times Staff Writers
August 23 2001

Letters purportedly written by at least two dead people landed on the desk
of Utah Atty. Gen. Mark Shurtleff earlier this year, imploring him to go
easy on Microsoft Corp. for its conduct as a monopoly.

The pleas, along with about 400 others from Utah citizens, are part of a
carefully orchestrated nationwide campaign to create the impression of a
surging grass-roots movement. But it may be backfiring.

The targets of the campaign, attorneys general of some of the 18 states
that have joined the Justice Department in suing Microsoft, have figured
out the campaign's origins, and they're fuming.

The campaign, orchestrated by a group partly funded by Microsoft, goes to
great lengths so that the letters appear to be spontaneous expressions
from ordinary citizens. Letters sent in the last month are printed on
personalized stationery using different wording, color and
typefaces--details that distinguish those efforts from common lobbying
tactics that go on in politics every day. Experts said there's little
precedent for such an effort supported by a company defending itself
against government accusations of illegal behavior.

"I've never heard of it before," said UC Berkeley business professor David
Vogel. "If any firm should be at the cutting edge of using technology for
lobbying, it should be Microsoft."

Regulators became suspicious of the ruse after noticing that the same
sentences appear in the letters and that some return addresses appear
invalid.

"It's an obvious corporate attempt to manipulate citizen input," said Rick
Cantrell, community relations director for the Utah attorney general.

"You can just tell these were engineered. When there's a real groundswell,
people walk in, they fax, they call. We get handwritten letters."

Microsoft officials, whose aggressive lobbying tactics in the antitrust
battle have raised eyebrows in the past, said they simply are responding
to the lobbying efforts of competitors.

"There's been a political campaign waged against Microsoft for a number of
years by well-funded special interest companies like AOL, Oracle, Sun
Microsystems and their trade associations," Microsoft spokesman Vivek
Varma said. "It's not surprising that companies and organizations that
support Microsoft are mobilizing to counter that lobby."

Indeed, Microsoft's competitors have helped craft some of the legal
strategy against the company, and they actively lobby against the Redmond,
Wash., software firm. Oracle, for one, was criticized for hiring a private
investigator that combed through a pro-Microsoft group's trash. But those
companies say they haven't tried to drum up activism by the public in the
Microsoft antitrust battle.

Microsoft referred questions about the new campaign to the group running
it, Americans for Technology Leadership, which gets some money from
Microsoft but won't say how much. ATL was founded in 1999 as a spinoff of
the Assn. for Competitive Technology, another pro-Microsoft group.

People working for ATL call residents and at first say they are conducting
a poll about the Microsoft case. People who express support for Microsoft
are sent letters to sign, along with handstamped, pre-addressed envelopes
to their state attorney general, to President Bush and to their members of
Congress.

Asked about the relationship between the telephone calls to citizens and
the subsequent letters, ATL Executive Director Jim Prendergast initially
said those who agreed the prosecution was misguided merely were given
suggestions about what to use in drafting their own letters.

"We gave them a few bullet points, but that's about the extent of it," he
said.

Asked why some phrases were identical, Prendergast then conceded the
letters were written by his operation. "We'd write the letter and then
send it to them," he said. "That's fairly common practice."

Engineers of grass-roots campaigns prize the most individualistic
expression, knowing pre-printed missives have far less effect.

"The more orchestrated it gets, the less influence it has," said Stanford
University business professor David Baron, who has written on political
activism by corporations. "Handwritten letters that are written by human
beings can make a difference."

It's not clear how many states are targeted in the campaign, or how much
is being spent to generate the letters.

Grass-roots specialists typically charge $25 to $75 for each letter from
ordinary citizens and much more for letters from public officials or
celebrities, said Nancy Clack of Precision Communications, a political
communications company. Because each Microsoft letter is different, the
cost of the ATL campaign probably is on the high end of the scale. If the
group is aiming for 100 letters in each of the 18 states, the tab easily
could exceed $100,000.

The letter-writing exercise is part of a larger plan to sway Congress and
encourage prosecutors to pursue a settlement in advance of a court hearing
on how the company should be punished for illegally maintaining its
monopoly on computer operating systems.

The maker of Windows and other software also has stepped up campaign
donations, becoming the fifth-largest soft-money donor to the national
Republican and Democratic parties in 1999-2000, and it has hired a slew of
well-connected lobbying firms.

To assist it in the grass-roots campaign, Microsoft turned to two of the
nation's top political advocacy groups: Boston-based Dewey Square Group,
co-founded by Al Gore campaigner Michael Whouley, and Phoenix-based
DCI/New Media, led by Republican strategist Tom Synhorst.

One crop of letters began rolling into state offices this spring.

Quietly distributed by another Microsoft-supported group, Citizens Against
Government Waste, those letters were identical except for the signature.

Minnesota Atty. Gen. Mike Hatch said he got about 300 of those. "It's
sleazy," he said. "This is not a company that appears to be bothered by
ethical boundaries."

State officials said they won't be swayed by the effort, and Hatch
responded with his own mailings to the senders, explaining his position.

Some recipients wrote back by hand, apologizing for passing along the
Microsoft-inspired letters. "I sure was misled," one wrote.

Utah officials found that two prefab letters from Citizens Against
Government Waste bore the typed names of dead people. Those names had been
crossed out by family members who signed for them. And another letter came
from "Tuscon, Utah," a city that doesn't exist.

In recent weeks, the strategy was refined to engineer more-individualized
letters to state officials and the Bush administration.

Iowa Atty. Gen. Tom Miller's office has received more than 50 anti-lawsuit
letters in the last month from state residents.

No two letters are identical, but the giveaway lies in the phrasing.

Four Iowa letters include this sentence: "Strong competition and
innovation have been the twin hallmarks of the technology industry."

Three others use exactly these words: "If the future is going to be as
successful as the recent past, the technology sector must remain free from
excess regulation."

Some residents who fielded ATL's calls believed the states themselves were
soliciting their views, according to the attorneys general of Minnesota,
Illinois and Utah.

When a caller started asking Minnesotan Nancy Brown questions about
Microsoft, she thought she was going to get help figuring out what was
wrong with her computer.

Instead, the caller wanted to know whether she agreed that federal and
state antitrust prosecutors had better things to do than attack the leader
of the high-tech economy.

"They were trying to get me to say the government had no business
interfering with Microsoft," Brown said. "I said I didn't agree with
that."