Of course, if I’m paid that much then I’d probably have one of those “executive blogs” which seem to get a lot of traffic too.

No one seems to mind that Jonathan Schwartz is paid a lot of money. Or Mark Cuban.

Is there a difference – both in public and internal perception – of a person employed by Microsoft to be a technical evangelist, who makes under $100,000 annually, and who happens to be a very popular blogger… and a person who is being paid $250,000 annually by Microsoft to blog?

There most certainly is.

Whatever the claims of a Robert Scoble, whatever the words of a Robert Scoble…. in the former context one doesn’t question his integrity, credibility, and motives nearly as much as in the latter context.

Now, is every staff blogger who is employoed by someone by definition in a position to potential cross the line into a conflict of interest? Of course. NDAs, non-complete clauses, trade secrets, all of it. Yes… by definition, the potential is ALWAYS legally there.

But again, all legalities aside – the reality is that many many more people would look at a Robert Scoble with a cautious eye if he suddenly receivedc a 250% increase in pay and was officially made the Microsoft blogger. It’s simply a fact of life.

At this point Scoble has done a fantastic service for Microsoft with his blog. No question. And his reputation within MS should be very high because of it. But his effectiveness of “putting a face” to MS would be severely limited if this sort of thing happened.

The very moment you pay a person $250,000 (that’s a twenty-five with four zeroes) to do nothing but blog about a company – ANY company – you’ve just officially added a PR person to your staff. You’ve just made it official that you want editorial control over what they say. Period.

Look at the whole discussion everywhere about Marquis paying bloggers. To do what? To post about their product! Do you really think this would be any different?

Scoble takes abuse virtually every day for his pro-MS bias already. Nonetheless, he’s respected for everything he is NOT… specifically that he is not really a MS shill. But this insane idea of publicly giving him a 250% raise and change in title would completely change all that.

I was surprised when Scoble posted awhile back that he didn’t make more than 100k. For all he does for M$, for all the great minds that he has personally and directly interacted with and/or has had access to, logic would suggest that he should be a millionaire by now, or certainly well on his way.

I guess this is a further example that blogging in and of itself isn’t respected by the majority of corporate America in how it is directly tied to the bottom line. If it were, we’d see more bloggers being hired for significant salaries. Can anybody name even one blogger who has been hired for corporate America to do nothing but blogging and made $100k+? Instead, I think this is being assigned to PR departments and not getting a classification on its own which means the blogging will be done in the majority of cases half-assed at best (sorry PR people).

Scoble himself has said how much he does the blog in his spare time and not because it’s part of his job. Therefore the fact that Scoble isn’t making a quarter mill+ is because he hasn’t successfully parlayed his exposure and publicity into a business model.

As much I wish Shel and he good luck with this project, I seriously doubt this book they are writing will make any of them any significant money. More likely it will just increase their public exposure and if they are smart they will figure out how to parlay that into more $$$.

Jeremy, I’ll give you credit for being a guy who can convert publicity into $$$. Scoble, by his own admission, doesn’t seem to have been able to do that yet with similar success and Shel I do not really know.

Personally and professionally, I would like to see blogging directly generating more income so it earns this much needed respect from the business world but the reality in this area is that it hasn’t panned out (yet) any more than podcasting has had any significant impact (yet) on radio.

Also, if Waggener Edstrom was not paid by the number of times they use “solution” and “framework” in a press release, perhaps this site – http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/ – could just have an “informal” section, written by an intern, who would track various projects that Microsoft is working on and post the updates. Or hey, they could even get a blogger off eBay:-)