Jun 20 07
Blogstitution?
By Scott Sigler
“Blogstitution” is my fancy new phrase for combining “blogging” with “prostitution.” I’m quite impressed with myself, thank you very much. Now that I’m done with my fun word of the day, let’s chat about an issue that could impact corporate use of social media and communications.
Some people call it “flogging,” or “fake blogging,” but flogging is usually associated with a company creating a fake blog. The company creates a site that is supposed to be either an independent industry site, which happens to love said company’s products, or it creates a blog that is supposed to be a customer site, which happens to be full of customers who love said company. The most known example of this is the Walmart blog fiasco.
But now there is a service called PayPerPost. This site lets companies pay existing bloggers to talk about their product or service. So, it’s pay-to-play, you as the blogger are selling your services to the highest bidder, hence, “blogstitution.”
But the world’s oldest profession is apparently good business. PayPerPost recently received $7 million in funding.
Now to be fair, PPP has a “code of ethics,” where you have to put a little badge on your site, so people know you are available to sell yourself to anyone with a fistfull of cash. But let’s be honest - who pays attention to those little sidebar images anymore? Those things fade into the background, and all you really see is the content of your, ahem, “trusted content provider.” PPP also says that you can write anything you want - good or bad - about the product or service for which you’ve pimped yourself out. Wow, I feel the journalistic integrity rushing back into the system already …
PARTNER CHANNEL REVENUE:
So PPP sounds like a bad thing, something that corrupts the presumed integrity of the independent blogger. But look at it from the Fortune 500 tech company space. Say you’re Cisco, or Juniper, and you blog to thousands of partners every week. There are companies that want to reach those partners, and often, those companies are other partners. With a service like PPP, people could approach the communication team and ask for blog-coverage of products, services or offerings. And, these offers come with money, which reduces the communication budget expenditure (money in means less money out, right?).
I don’t think this would ever work for a blog aimed at end customers, but for the channel, facilitating collaboration is a good thing. If companies are motivated enough to solicit the channel blog for service, that alone is an indicator that their content might deserve some coverage. After all, a partner blog is there to inform partners of competitive advantages.
The channel is an audience, like any other audience. Eventually, people want to reach that audience - people who have a product to sell, looking for buyers who would want to pay for that product. That’s a coming mental shift for a lot of communication teams: the comm-team is a content provider. That brings with it the opportunity to build a loyal audience, and also people that want to reach that audience through you.
Congratulations. You’re on your way to grabbing your own little piece of the world’s media creation.
But if you get busted for pimping in the red-light district, I’m not bailing you out.
