Evelyn Rodriguez posts on a US dot com venture buying bloggers to praise their service. As she notes, a lack of imagination in play all around. At the recent BARC conference a lot was made of authenticity (not surprising given that was the conference theme, and also models for advertising / making money via blogs. One of the key points is that you can attempt to foll people some of the time but in the blogosphere you will get found out, as seems to have happened in this story.
So the opportunity to create a long lasting positive relationship with many people has ended up being a short term boost to sales, followed by negative publicity. In effect an interruption model plus negative PR. Not what blogging is about at all. Sabrina Dent was very frustrated with traitional marketing / promotion being applied to blogging and I can sympathise. I for one right now could really do with a few companies to come dump some money but then I know it would be a waste of time for the firm and wouldn't make me a sustainable income either, in fact for both of us it would leave a nasty taste. Instead it would be much more intersting to approach this from the whole PR perspective as identified in yesterday's post.
Most of all though, authenticity is about bias + transparency = credibility as Adriana so beautifully put it.
Posted by Paul Goodison at July 7, 2005 11:04 AM | TrackBack