To shill, or not to shill

I was surprised nine days ago to see an email in my inbox from someone called “Starbucks VIA Moderator.” I knew that the big national launch of Starbucks’s instant coffee product, called VIA, was imminent. I also recalled that I had written a little review of the product in my blog back in February. And I recalled that what I had written was pretty reasonable – my honest opinion, with little editorializing and only few snide asides.

The subject line on the email read “Love that blog!” so I was confident that Starbucks VIA Moderator was not someone in the legal department. Starbucks has a bunch of lawyers, and while I always enjoyed working with them, there is little chance that an email from them concerning something I had written about Starbucks would contain good news. It turns out that they were looking for “user-generated content” about VIA to use on the VIA website. Well, all right, I thought, this could be my big break. The world is full of people whose blogs or tweets or videos are discovered and “go viral,” and the result is often a sort of modern variation on fame and fortune. (For the lucky, this amounts to a brief period of relatively painless notoriety and excruciatingly small additions to bank accounts. The unlucky somehow end up embarrassed and broke, but with at least two lawyers on retainer – one criminal and one to negotiate the book deal, or more likely, a reality show. It’s sort of a choice between “what might have been” and “if I’d known then what I know now.”)

The email promised that my material would be used in such a way that visitors to the Starbucks VIA site who chose to read it would see what I wrote and actually see it on the Sodcutter blog. I thought this seemed pretty cool – the last thing I wanted was for someone to cherry-pick the very best things I said about VIA. So I was leaning towards saying yes.

But wait! There’s more! In addition to the potential for tens of new visitors to my blog, the email also promised me a three-month “subscription” to VIA from the Starbucks Store.com. The definition of a three month supply seemed shockingly generous: three twelve packs per month beginning “by the first of November.” This struck me as lavish, because even acquaintances who’ve said positive things about VIA to me nearly always qualify their praise with comments like “it’s great for backpacking” or “it sure beats bad hotel coffee.” And the truth is, I have not purchased or consumed a single serving of VIA since I had written about the samples I received in February. And not only am I not a backpacker, one of the great joys of our annual family camping trip is hauling out the old Melitta cones and one-cup coffee filters and making coffee each morning.

So after re-reading my original comments about VIA and getting some input from a few friends and having my ex-lawyer wife (she’s an ex-lawyer, not an ex-wife) read the two-page legal document that allows Starbucks to use the material anywhere in the universe and in any media already or yet to be invented (really, that’s in the document), I decided to give the go-ahead.

And oh! What a whirlwind it has been! For about two hours on “launch day,” the first few lines of my article and a link to my blog, though not front and center, were somewhat easy to find. Now, after four days and thousands and thousands of people tasting VIA and “generating content”, my moment has passed, my content buried behind page upon page of headlines like these:

“Livin la VIA loca”

“Via – pretty good”

“SUPRISINGLY WAY BETTER THAN PIKE PLACE.” (not good news for last year’s big breakthrough product!)

“Versatile Means More Options” (also under consideration for inclusion at dictionary.com)

“Haven’t tried it, but I love it.” (what is this, foxnews.com?)

Would I do it all again? Sure I would. Any regrets? None.

But now I either need to take up backpacking, spend some nights in lousy hotels, or figure out what to do with all the VIA coming my way, because I still prefer fresh-brewed coffee. And unlike many of my fellow content generators, I can taste the difference, just as much now as I could in February.