UPDATED: Thoughts on Blogola
Spent a pleasant few minutes (so few, but they go so fast) talking with Kathleen Petty and Andrea Tomkins on CBC Radio this morning talking about giveaways and bloggers. UPDATE: Here’s the audio, in the hated RealAudio format. Sorry.
As I drove home, I thought about the frustration of having what, to radio, seems like a fairly significant discussion about a subject, but in reality, missing out on the thousands of posts, let alone thousands of words, written about blogger relations and ethics around giveaways to bloggers.
A couple of thoughts that I wasn’t able to get into the discussion:
- According to Technorati’s last State of the Blogosphere, the median income for bloggers is $200 (US). There are a few who make scads of money from their blogs — Dooce, for example, is rumoured to take in $40,000 per month. But the vast majority of bloggers make little to no money. So does this make us MORE or LESS susceptible to blogola? On one side, you could see it as a slight reward for a lot of effort. On the other, you could see it as being proportionately greater in terms of impact on the blogger — if someone sent me a $1000 camera, that would be a huge equivalent of income for my blog (given that I don’t think I’ve ever made ANY money from it).
- The attention given to blogger giveaways and the HUGE criticism of some bloggers and corporations (Chris Brogan, come on down; Microsoft, here’s your prize) for perceived ethical failings ignores the fact that bloggers rely on the credibility that their audiences vest in them. If I lose the respect of my readers I lose whatever rationale there was to send me stuff in the first place.
Anyone else out there with thoughts? Would love to hear them.
Ciao,
Bob.
FreshBooks – the amazing time tracking / invoicing / project management solution
Hello Sir,
I visited your site http://www.flacklife.com it is very much informative and it shares so many educational information which gives many thing to know . I am very much impressed to your site. I have been maintaining this blog http://nonsense-verse.blogspot.com to share the NASA information to everybody. My blog deals with current news on NASA Space Shuttle Missions, International Space Station News, Astronauts News and Moon & Mars, Aeronautics, Science & Technology.
So if you could provide me a link to my blog, it will be much more useful for user and young school and college peoples. It would be great pleasure if you can add this link http://nonsense-verse.blogspot.com in your site so that it can benefit our visitors.
Your site contains so many other standard information which gives more knowledge. The presentation of the information is very nice and made the users to read it get the concepts in the right manner.
Our title is Nasa Space Information.
Hope you would add my blog.
Waiting for your positive reply.
Thank you
With Regards,
John David
Hi Bob,
Enjoyed the interview on CBC this morning.
I'm with your other commenters in that if a blogger is transparent (i.e. this is a sponsored post, this person gave me tickets to see their show, etc) then I don't have a problem with it at all.
If I've already built up a trust with that blogger's writings, then I trust them to be able to make a fair assessment on something even if it was given to them at no cost.
I love how Andrea refuses to fall all over a freebie just because it's free. She calls it like it is. And I trust her as a result.
Like Joe says, it's in the blogger's best interest anyhow to be transparent and maintain your readers' trust. If they want to risk that, then so be it.
Julie
I had so much to say on this topic and we had so little time.
A few thoughts:
- I wanted to speak up about unsolicited mail and how annoying it is
- I also wanted to talk about how some bloggers practically fall over themselves for free stuff and are essentially giving multi-million dollar companies free advertising and they get nothing in return but a lousy box of cereal (or maybe we touched on that?)
- how easily social media marketing can backfire. I received a press release for a new PRE-SLICED frozen pizza which comes packaged with a fancy pants bake n'serve tray… you know, because we moms are sooooo busy we can't find the time to pre-slice our own pizza? Anyway I wrote a whole post about the many many things that are wrong with this kind of convenience food.
After I posted did a google to search if anyone had written about the same pizza. Sure enough, some people just cut and paste their press release into a blog post. GAH!
Anyway, I could go on. But I have to be somewhere. Great discussion Bob! Let's keep it going!
I wish I'd heard you guys.
I have made a whopping $75US over two years by having an ad banner up on my blog! Woo!
Mom blogs have been getting a lot of hits in particular in the last while for this kind of stuff (and these are the types of blogs I know best so what my comments are based on). I've noticed a definite change in the last year in the blogs I see, particularly in the number of blogs that are devoted to reviewing products for moms. I am amazed at a) how some bloggers seem to have so much to review with a second item to giveaway and b) how many entries these people get. I remember when a giveaway was special!
I feel that personally I have lost faith in most of the review blogs because you know they got something for free and they feel like they should write something nice about whatever thing they got for free. I don't resent the review, I just don't necessarily bother paying attention to what they have to say.
As a business owner, we regularly get emails requesting free products from moms to review on their blogs. I would imagine that it's quite easy to get bigger companies to send them something for a bit of publicity – it's a lot cheaper than advertising and easier to just say yes to the requests than to actively figure out what bloggers make sense to target.
Anyhow, all this rambling is essentially getting at the fact that I don't see what the big deal is. For the most part, it seems pretty obvious to me when someone is reviewing things for money or free stuff. Those blogs don't ring true to me. Blogs like Miss Fish's who only does the occasional giveaway and who you feel like you know and trust from the rest of their content are the kinds of reviews and giveaways that still have any impact on me. And for all the others… let them get their free stuff – who cares?
I had the same feeling, Bob. Seemed like you guys were shoehorned in without enough time to devote to a fairly nuanced topic.
In that spirit, here's my take shoehorned into your comments section.
If a blogger is at a high enough level to be offered blogola, one has to assume they have a pretty dedicated audience (reason #132 nobody has offered me free shit). And as you noted, that audience is there because they've cultivated some level of trust in the blogger.
It seems to me that it's in that blogger's best interest to be transparent. Every time. It's as simple as "this is a sponsored post" a la Brogan or, even better, a quick paragraph giving the requisite background. If the readers trust the blogger, they'll appreciate the heads-up and they'll decide for themselves if the review / post is tainted by the blogola. Moreover, their bullshit detectors will go off if the blogger seems a little to enthsiastic.