Category: Social media

This is what you get when you apply “paid media” thinking to building relationships with bloggers:

Murphy is launching PayPerPost.com, which will automate such hookups between advertisers and bloggers and thus codify a new frontier of product placement. Advertisers pay to post details about their “opportunity,” specifying, among other things, how they want bloggers to write about, say, a new shoe, if they want photos to be included, and whether they’ll pay only for positive mentions.

…

It’s better for a brand to get into a blog than to surround it as a banner or text ad, says Murphy.

(From BusinessWeek: Polluting the Blogosphere)

This is stupid in a number of ways:

1. It will make your customers disappointed. They’ll expect a great product but will receive something mediocre that wasn’t able to get a positive buzz by itself.
2. You’ll target the wrong blogs. The high-credibility blogs about your kind of product wouldn’t touch this for fear of losing their readers. Your product will end up being mentioned on smaller blogs without a specific focus. It will be search engine fodder at best.
3. Bloggers will talk bad about your products “off the record”; telling their friend the only reason they wrote positively about your product was to earn $5.

Your positive word-of-mouth will end up being negative word-of-mouth in the places where it matters; where friends talk to friends.

Now, did I say this was stupid?

Sam Flemming apparently caused a change to the Technorati 100 when he asked them why Chinese movie celebrity Xu Jing Lei was not listed as number one. She now is.

I suppose that’s fine if all you measure is audience across the whole blog media. But it does beg the question as to why a list of top bloggers - uncategorized - is a relevant measure. There are blogs on any subject and in many languages. So to whom is Xu Jing Lei number one? Those who speak Chinese to begin with, and who have an interest in her as a person. To whom is Boing Boing number one (or two, as it is now)? Endgadget? A List Apart? Gawker? Each has a niche and a specific language.

We wouldn’t list print media uncategorized, so why should we do that with blogs. When we do, what we list is not influence, it’s who consumes the most bandwidth.

As Steve Rubel notes, the explosion of blogs in languages other than English will push the so-called “a-list” bloggers down the list. But in what relevant way were they A to begin with?

The BBC’s plans to reinvent itself online is causing some debate. Here’s one who’s realy angry.

Could someone explain this, please: Public service started out as a way to serve the public content that would not be provided by media companies in a free market. Now the BBC sees the need to reinvent its online presence because “the corporation will become irrelevant, particularly to younger audiences” if it doesn’t. But isn’t that just fine if someone else provides the relevant stuff? Like MySpace.com, the ones the BBC claims to compete with, does for a younger audience.

And by the way, isn’t it easier just to slap the word “BETA” under the logo on their existing web site and have all this 2.0 stuff dealt with once and for all?

• BBC Goes 2.0 (via Micro Persuasion). Question to ask: What does this mean for the competition in the British online market, when a publicly funded company expands from it’s original mission as a public service broadcaster into new media?
• Google Maps add streets and directions for Europe (Google Maps Mania, via Download Squad). Look out, Eniro.
• Survival of the Richest (Technology Review). An interesting read about why some people are better adapted for making money in the financial market. “It’s rational to cut your losses and ride your gains”, Andrew W. Lo says. But a lot of people won’t, and that’s because of survival instincts.