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Paid Posts, Izea, Kmart, Sears, Social Media, Reputations and Cash Money
Last week paid review service Izea launched a "social media" campaign for K-Mart which offered several high profile bloggers a $500 gift card to go on a free shopping spree as long as they wrote a review of their experience. The campaign also included a nice nugget of traffic for the bloggers because they were also to give away a $500 gift card to one of their readers. To enter the contest, you needed to spam Twitter with a message such as, "RT @eMom is giving away a $500 Kmart Gift Card on her blog – simply comment or tweet to enter: (url)". Immediately when I saw these posts, both on the participating blogs and the spam on Twitter, I asked to speak with Izea CEO Ted Murphy about the campaign.
I’ve always been interested in watching how Ted moves. Ted pushes the envelope as far as possible which can have positive and negative consequences. I enjoy discussions about moving the conversation forward. Ted has also been willing to go right after the valley elite bloggers (something most others will do in private but never in public). The conversation with Ted around the campaign was good and he was open to my feedback and thoughts. Understand that I’ve managed the online spend for some of the largest consumer brands in the world and to me this campaign came off as nothing more than paying for a few positive reviews. It also seems that more than one of the bloggers who received the $500 are on the Izea board of bloggers. My net take is that the money was given to the complete wrong set of bloggers for the campaign to have any real effectiveness for Kmart’s target market.
If the Kmart paid campaign had the bloggers go into the store and select items for disadvantaged kids, military families overseas, kids with diseases, kids with no parents, etc., I would have felt somewhat better about the campaign. Checking the amazingly positive reviews from the paid bloggers, I did notice that Chris Brogan purchased a few items for a charity and Shoemoney purchased a pack of underwear for a military family. It’s actually interesting that none of the paid bloggers thought of this.
Very Positive Store Reviews
Here’s an example of how overly positive the reviews were. Shoemoney said, "Amazing prices on media" – I went to Kmart and priced the media and their prices can’t even come close to most online retailers or even BestBuy. Chris Brogan notes that he saved over $200 on his purchases and that the huge savings were a shock to him. I guess Chris doesn’t do a lot of offline shopping because if he did, he’d know that all stores use this as a way to get you to believe you saved something when you really didn’t. I’d be happy to scan my grocery receipts to show you plenty of examples.
Pretty funny, Julia Roy went to one of the stores in NYC. I’d love to go back to the store with Julia to do a real video review. She says the store isn’t visually appealing. Frankly that’s the least of the issues in both NYC stores. You will note that unlike many of the other paid bloggers, she tightly crops her photos, has no photos inside the store and basically ignores the store itself, instead just pimps all the free goods she got! I’d love to know if one, just one, of her readers actually went to Kmart after reading her review.
The real question here is what did Kmart get out of the positive paid reviews? In my opinion they got nothing out of it. What I’d like to see are receipts from each of the paid bloggers for their Kmart purchases in January, March and August of 2009. Clearly they loved Kmart so much they will certainly go back, right? I am also really interested to see the presentation that Ted and his team will show Kmart. If we look back to 1995, "hits" were the big metric which was amazingly gamed. I am guessing that Ted will shoe a chart pointing to just how many mentions of "Kmart" were said on Twitter during the promotion period. Those numbers are absolutely meaningless. There were two options to enter: one was to go to Kmart.com and find the item you want to win and post it on one of the paid blogger posts. The other way was to post a message on Twitter pointing to the paid blogger posts. Chris even tells his readers basically not visit the Kmart site and just do the "simple" option of a Twitter message! I have asked Ted for his Kmart contact – would love to have a conversation with him/her about their takeaways.
If anyone won with this campaign, it certainly wasn’t Kmart.
Sears Paid Post Campaign
Let’s move ahead to the current campaign Izea is running with Kmart’s parent company Sears. It looks like Ted took my suggestion of having the bloggers shop for charities. This at least moves the campaign a bit further along the stick of reasonableness. Unfortunately, it does appear that some of the paid bloggers for Sears bought items for themselves. I guess the traffic boost wasn’t enough to satisfy. Here are a couple of examples: Techipedia and Chris Heuer. You’d think that Sears would want to push their brand new mobile ordering site to these early adopters and social media users.
This Sears campaign didn’t even ask readers of the paid bloggers to go to the Sears website, instead once again a comment or a twitter message was required to enter. I can’t believe someone at Sears corporate approved this. Seriously.
Risks to Brands
Move forward to this past weekend. I got a call from Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang at 7am on Saturday. He wanted to discuss my thoughts on the campaigns because apparently he advises his clients on whether they should be using this type of online media in their marketing budgets. It appeared that during the balance of Saturday and Sunday morning there was some bitchmeme between Jeremiah, Chris Brogan and Aaron Brazell. Aaron is one of the Sears paid bloggers and I guess wanted to defend himself before the campaign came out today. Frankly I don’t care about any of the fighting. The net result of the fighting were 3 main blog posts:
I would say I know all three of these gentlemen about the same. Chris did help me get a small ad campaign last month and I’ve known Jeremiah the longest. So it pains me to say this but I basically disagree mostly with Jeremiah’s post and am disappointed with his "risks to brands" section. His post could read as the sales brochure for Izea. Jeremiah writes:
For brands, they should realize that this is not the only way to reach customers, many brands are reaching customers in social networks, building online communities, and using corporate blogs. Brands shouldn’t put all their resources into sponsored blog posts.
Think about all of the risks that a brand could be subject to, this was the best that a supposedly top ranking analyst could come up with? I know I am being harsh but his statement just came as a total shock to me from someone who I consider quite intelligent.
The real risk to brands is the damage they could face from having people spew amazingly positive comments about their products. The average mainstream blog reader doesn’t know the different between paid shill and unbiased, authentic reviews. Look at the damage that Walmart and Sony faced last year with their blogging efforts. I can provide many examples of brands being tarnished by making bad decisions. This is the real risk – what happens if it comes to light that one (or more) of the paid Kmart bloggers purposely wrote a very positive review in the hopes of getting more work and in fact their real review would have been much more critical? Or if that blogger accidentally mentions on Twitter that the post was fake? Sure that will probably be a negative for the blogger but it will be much more of a negative for the retailer. Kmart is already at the bottom of the food chain, can they afford a social media attack (see Motrin) on their brand? Brand damage is the biggest risk to a brand who gambles with paid blogging. There are other risks and at the end of the risk chain is the risk that Jeremiah mentions above.
Update: Jeremiah noted this evening about the balance that must be considered when running a paid review. "There are four stakeholders that must balance: Brands (buyers), Bloggers (inventory), community (ROI), and Izea (Broker)". I would generally agree with his statement.
Risks To Bloggers
The most popular risk I hear that bloggers face with regards to paid posts is that if they don’t tell the truth they will lose credibility and therefore their audience. Hogwash. To quote my buddy Gabe Rivera, "readers don’t care". In general readers stay no matter what happens if they like the writer, the content, or the community. The only thing that could affect the blogger is if they don’t note that the post is paid (i.e. transparency). This was apparently the issue with the "payperpost" company that predated Izea. As long as they provide disclosure, my comment above stands.
Final Thoughts on Paid Blogging
I am all for paid advertorials. This is where a company purchases a post on a blog – the company can do with it as they wish. ReviewMe runs these type of campaigns I believe. Here’s an example of this type of advertorial on VentureBeat.
I am not a fan of paid reviews because as you can see with the Kmart campaign, it pushes bloggers to write positive reviews. My concern has always been that paid reviewers who write negative reviews won’t get future work so the tendancy is to write more positively than would normally be exercised. As a former public auditor, it’s just not a pill I am willing to swallow. In fact, over the long-term, it will hurt blogging as a profession more than it will ever help. The short term wins for the mommy bloggers (they are the biggest group of paid reviewers) and other paid reviewers will be felt in the long term. Think of where we are now as the 2005 period for U.S. mortgages and you know what came next.
I’ve been offered so many campaigns on our sister site HTMLCenter over the past 12 years I can’t even count that high. I get offers daily to run all sorts of paid campaigns – most would never be visible to the average reader and would allow me to get ahead of my bills and get rid of my 20 year old tv that no longer shows the color blue. But I refuse every single time. And I won’t run paid reviews on my sites no matter how much a company offers. Everyone has to make their own decisions and by no means am I forcing my opinions onto other blogs.
I do think Ted will do very well as there are plenty of people who will be willing to take his campaigns and run for the endzone with them. What little I do know about Ted, he’s an excellent salesman (he could sell ice to an eskimo). I sure hope he is considering if he will leave the blogging industry better than when he found it when he cashes out.
Again, big eyes in the short-term will hurt the industry as a whole in the long-term. And with that, I conclude this way-too-long post. Next time we will take a look at what is a "social media" campaign. Thanks for reading.
Other posts over the past few days include: Duncan Riley, Stowe Boyd, and Lucretia Pruitt.
Allen,
I enjoyed your blog post and totally agree with you. I think paid blog posts are wrong for brands and tend to diminish rather than enhance brands that engage in this tactic.
I also wanted to inform you that I used a small part of your article on my blog. Because I disagree with Forrester’s stand on paid blog posts, I issued a public offer to Forrester to accept a paid blog post promoting my blog on the Groundswell blog. I was surprised when they responded via a post on their Groundswell blog. Thought you might be interested.
My blog post: http://www.experiencetheblog.com/2009/08/my-paid-blog-post-on-forrester-blog.html
Forrester’s response: http://blogs.forrester.com/groundswell/2009/08/to-augie-ray-thanks-for-the-offer-but-we-dont-take-sponsorships.html
Great, insightful blog post. Thanks!
hey chris -
totally up to you what forms of monetization u explore, and I’m not ‘shooting’ u just observing that your experiment may alter the credibility & trust you’ve earned with some audiences, or at least color it a bit.
and it’s also cool with me if Tiger pitches for Buick (a product I’d never buy), but at the same time it also changes my perception of his authenticity when pitching Accentute (a product I *might* buy or recommend, under certain circumstances).
by all means explore. just a word of caution on the methods of exploration u choose, and the destinations u set out for. some journeys change a man… just ask Shackleford. or his men.
Dave – one of my roles within my organization is learning how businesses can interact online. I’d say that blogging purism aside, there are many avenues that businesses are exploring. See all the ads on Allen’s sidebar? According to a few studies (who was it? Spolsky? Zawodny?), heatmaps suggest that people don’t even see those ads any more. To that end, content marketing might become more and more a needed element for reaching more people.
Is the methodology suggested by Izea the right one? Not sure, but if we don’t experiment, and we don’t explore, and we don’t try to figure out the next potential business relationships that use more modes than “earned” media, how will we know?
Shoot the explorers. Makes sense to me.
Or maybe I didn’t do it for money. But that would presume that you did more than find comments on the dadomatic post and didn’t read the rest of the information about the story.
thanks for stopping by Dave and for the compliment!
in an interesting turn i actually think all of this has helped chris – he has probably picked up a good bit of new subs from it – although i do agree with you.
nice piece allen.
i think you might be a little harsh on jeremiah’s summary post, but in general i tend to agree with your analysis (and also his initial tweet ;) overalli think chris is a pretty good guy, but payperpost does make me sit back & think a bit.
i’m sure it works as a biz model to some extent, and i don’t worry too much about the Kmart brand — that’s kind of like me worrying about whether i’m damaging my white trash WV hillbilly heritage… seriously, i’m proud of where i’m from but i really did spend some time growing up in a trailer park, and it’s nice to have managed just a little upward social mobility since then. Kmart should be so lucky as to worry about having a brand to damage ;)
actually, i think chris brogan has more to worry about damage to his brand than kmart does to theirs. sounds like Ted is a pretty smart guy, and from Kmart’s perspective the campaign probably works (like you, i agree with gabe rivera on that point). however, i think chris is very well respected in social media circles, and i wonder if this doesn’t change people’s opinion a little bit about his work. probably not much based on this one incident, but it probably doesn’t work for him to make this his primary gig… altho i seriously doubt that’s where it’s headed.
anyway, good food for thought & i appreciate the summary from both you & jeremiah.
Izea is totally in the driver’s seat…if I think back to 1995, I would meet with brands (billion dollar brands) and time after time I would hear "oh we need a website" – when I asked why, the typical response was "because we need one" – I am fearful that brands will go into the paid reviews arena for the same (non) reason.
The whole thing seems slimey. Also, shows you these companies can’t get coverage on their own so they have to pay for it. I blogged about this today – it is a lose-lose situation for everyone. Izea is the only one who wins.
THanks for your comments BIll. I don’t have all of the answers. It was brilliant for Ted to force his paid reviewers to push them into Twitter. Did he move the needle on top of mind or awareness? i’d say he momentarily moved the needle on top of mind but not on awareness as there was nothing to be aware of (the contest doesn’t count).
I actually have been to the kmart on 8th st many times and the one at penn station. i really want to do a video from those stores to give some reality to what its like to shop there :)
btw i love your "function of" - somehow i am thinking we need to drop in a cos² at some point :-P
my 1-1-1-1 would work better on a diagram
Don’t know what exactly your point is about 1-1-1-1-1, :D but on twitter Julia Roy currently has 7,597 followers. Chris Brogan currently has 22,030 followers. Of course, there’s overlap, but that’s not 1-1 (unless I’m not getting your point). That’s (potentially) 1-22,030-[function of 22,030] and 1-7,597-[function of 7,597] and that doesn’t even count reposts by the originators. Add in the other four bloggers that participated, and it all sounds like a virus to me. :)
However, you study these things and I don’t, so I’ll defer to your opinion.
What Kmart "gets out of this" is that the word "Kmart" has been plastered all over twitter. Personally, I never even THINK about Kmart, so just the fact that I’m mentally aware of the retail chain today (and discussing them in posts) is a win for Kmart, IMO. The more visibility they have, the more chance there is that someone’s actually going to stumble in there to see what’s going on.
I think that’s a Kmart on 8th street near the 6 train. I believe I’ve been inside it ONE TIME, and that’s because the chick I was hanging out with was from England, and the prices over there are so high, it was in her best interest to buy things at Kmart (or whatever store that is down there) and pay to have it shipped back to Jolly Old.
The point being that I’ve walked past that place a bunch of times and NEVER wondered what was going on inside. I think the spamming of the word Kmart throughout twitter is just as good as a regular advertisement, especially when you add that "$500 gift card" is mentioned in the same breath.
Again, this is neither a field of interest nor of expertise of mine, so I’ll defer to your opinion about whether this form of visibility is worth anything to a company or not.
The point I was really making is that when you "hire" bloggers, you don’t just get access to them for the duration that your post is on their front page or continues to get hits. You get access to their entire network of followers, whether the bloggers make the posts themselves or someone else chooses to start a conversation by linking to the blogger’s content.
actually just to clarify – viral would mean that it spreads from 1-2-3 not 1-1-1-1-1 :)
I agree that Ted was smart to get people to spam the hell out of Twitter but just like I’ve said before, what did that do besides send traffic to his "influencers" ? How did that help Kmart?
I say that the opportunity to egregiously spam the twitter network was more valuable to Kmart than the “positive paid reviews”.
As you mention, nobody’s going to go to Kmart because Julia was paid to go there and get free stuff. People are going to say “Good for you. what did you get?” and that’s it.
OTOH, if you do a search on twitter for Kmart and one of the paid bloggers’ screen names, you’ll see that there have been people RTing the contest all the way to midnight last night (Tuesday). That’s completely without the bonus exposure of this entire discussion that’s been going on in SM ever since Saturday.
This is why “paid posts” aren’t isolated to the site they were posted on. Once the post goes up, it gets twittered and tumblr’d and pownced and reblogged all over the place. In this PARTICULAR case, people were apparently given incentive to propagate the word “Kmart” throughout their own networks in hopes of receiving the other $500 gift card.
It’s an actual virus. This was TRULY a viral campaign, and that’s what Kmart got for their money.
it’s hard for me to comment on the people you mention as I don’t really know them well enough. I do think schoemaker is similar to john chow and chow’s tagline is "i make money by showing you how to make money" – basically schoemaker made a lot of money when you could make it and has grown a following off that
here’s an interesting assigment – go to twitter – look at 500 random profiles – bet you that 50% of the profiles say "social media consultant" – back in 1995 i said we should have a test for people who say they are html experts – because everyone said they were an html expert – i did create a test and most failed it – in fact one guy came in and swore he had been coding html for 10 years (this was in 95!)
heck – your friend alana tayloer is a social media expert!
the problem is that the more people who say they are social media experts, the more the real experts get screwed – similar to how everyone is a seo expert!
I do agree on your valuation comment.
Interesting comment. You say that “too many bloggers don’t know how to sell so when someone waves x in front of them, they just say yes.”
Don’t disagree with that at all but aren’t some of these people self-proclaimed media and marketing experts?
Brogan’s bio reads “Chris Brogan is President of New Marketing Labs, a new media marketing agency…”
Schoemaker’s bio boasts about his ability to exploit and monetize various online trends and he’s got a photo of a $130,000+ AdSense check to prove he’s done it.
Roy is a “Social Media Coordinator” at a PR firm.
Are you telling me that none of these people were capable of placing a proper value on themselves?
I could understand if some 20-something college student or stay-at-home mom went for K-Marts offer but you would expect that the president of a marketing agency would know how to value a campaign. You would expect that a PR person in a “social media” role would understand the concept of authenticity and understand the value credibility. And you would expect that a guy who made $130,000+ from AdSense in a short period of time would recognize that shilling for a multi-million dollar retailer like K-Mart for an amount 260x less than that amount doesn’t make a whole lot of sense financially.
I guess it’s just another example of common sense not being so common. That or everybody in this social media/new media space is just full of shit.
thanks for commenting drama…as for your final thought piece, i am going to have another post on this later this week. it continues to go to the “short-term vs long-term” thinking.
i’ve told several of the larger blogs in my category that they should let me sell their ads – i’d make us all more money.
too many bloggers don’t know how to sell so when someone waves x in front of them, they just say yes.
Great post Allen.
A commenter on my blog recently asked if Loren Feldman’s K-Mart post bothered me. I said it didn’t – most of his stuff is over-the-top so the video showing him walking into a K-Mart and buying stuff on K-Mart’s dime was actually a bit amusing. Everyone knows his schtick so there weren’t any surprises. Without demeaning Feldmen, who I generally enjoy watching, I’m going to take his shopping recommendations with more than a grain of salt.
I was unaware of the posts by Shoemoney, Chris Brogan and Julia Roy, however, and you’re dead on with this post.
“Amazing prices on media.”
“I have to admit, I had a blast! I’ve not been inside a Kmart in a quite some time- not since my mom used to take my siblings and I there for back-t0-school shopping. The store experience is just how I remember it, not exactly visually beautiful but packed with deals that sure are pleasing to the pocket.”
“They have great name brand items that I don’t remember them offering before, which really took me by surprise.”
“Since their merging with Sears, Kmart has upped their name brand game. They had a few that really surprised me, like Dyson vacuum cleaners. Those are pretty high end, right?”
“I had a hunch that I’d have some fun in their electronics section, and I was right. They had quite a display of flat screen high definition TVs, and I knew most of the name brands.”
“It was in games that I was impressed again. They had a really good selection of XBOX360, PS3, and WII games (we have a Wii at home), as well as DS and PSP games. I was surprised, plus I had that sort of ‘secret’ feeling of realizing that I bet most people looking for games around the holidays have Kmart on their radar.”
Prostitute much?
I’m all for taking advantage of stupid brands that want to waste money. If K-Mart offered to fly me to the United States and give me a $500 shopping spree, I’d probably go out of my way to do it because I’m a stingy bastard and love saving money.
But there’s a fine line between writing a paid post and whoring yourself. It’s ironic that all of these social media twats talk about “authenticity” but none of these posts are very authentic. I guess authenticity is what you tell brands to demonstrate; you don’t actually have to display it when they give you a little bit of money.
Here’s a final thought: athletes and celebrities get paid millions of dollars to shill for brands. Bloggers are apparently bought off for as little as $500. What’s that say about how much the world of marketing has (or hasn’t) changed?
So much for the power of these influencers. Have an extra $5,000 laying around? Add a handful of popular bloggers to the list of things you can buy.
Excellent post Allen and a valuable lesson for brands. Other brands can definitely learn from the mistakes made in these campaigns and then examine their own social media approach before embarking on a social media campaign.
I think some of this leads back to the problem that many bloggers aren’t journos, and therefore, don’t live be journalistic ethics. Because a journo with ethics, such as Walt Mossberg or Harry McCracken (and bloggers such as yourself, Allen), would never indulge in such practices.
I think these campaigns (the good and the bad) are lessons for all of us – bloggers, brands, and marketers – to learn from and to tread lightly as we experiment in what works and what doesn’t. But keeping ethics and full disclosure in mind is key (IMO).
Sadly, it’s the blog readers who lose because the average reader out there probably doesn’t understand what goes on behind the scenes when it comes to promotions and the ugly side of it…schilling for a brand and not disclosing one’s relationship with that brand.
As you indicated, and as I did in my tweet, it’s an eco-system and all the parts have to work together.
There is some merit to your point– the bloggers are taking the flak for sponsored posts, not so much Kmart.
That’s one long post Allen! You make some great points. I won’t run paid review posts either – it juse does not feel right.
I think paid posts are ok if you truly do believe in the product and not just sell out to all advertisers. I mean if you just write about everything then its kinda dumb. Great points you have here!
the dollah bill pushes people to do things they normally would not do
perhaps biggie was right when he sang mo’ money mo’ problems
Great post!
I’m a blogger and I’ve worked in some campaigns hiring bloggers in Brazil. It’s funny to compare how these things go here and in the US and other places.
I think paid posts are somehow so new for everyone here in Brazil, that is always a big issue… some days ago, during a bloggers meeting, I could notice that people were most likely not to do paid posts, but reviews in exchange of products seemed to be cool for them.
I’ve always thought in US bloggers had already overcome these paid posts matters… but reading the story, your points and the comments, I can see that this is a subject bloggers, advertising and PR folks still need to talk about.
Good post, Allen. Even handed.
For my part, I did the pre-post, the post then I will do a post-post (??) in a few days that will pull together lessons learned. There are a variety of reasons why I did the Sears thing, not the least was to give IZEA a chance to redeem themselves in the eyes of the blogosphere.
Anyways…. more later. Thanks for the writeup.
"post-post" – that’s gold! :)
I stand behind what I said on Saturday (proof you don’t really read my firehose of a twitterstream, lol, although Jeremiah did before posting)
http://geekmommy.net/2008/12/13/what-is-your-time-worth-whats-worth-your-time/
I’m actually in a very different position to judge this and I’ll tell you right now – you associate your name with a retailer in the present Blogosphere mindset? You are damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
What I mean by that was the number of people who have posted since August being convinced that as one of Walmart’s Elevenmoms I must a) be getting paid, b) never shop at Walmart, c) be getting kickbacks or something and when they find out that a) nope, not paid b) yep, have shopped regularly at Walmart for years, c) nope, didn’t even get a $500 Walmart gift card from Nickelodeon who paid for the $500 contest on my site (and other 11moms’) – then the tune turns to how I’m ‘holding other bloggers back because now retailers will think that we will work for them for free!’
There’s an old adage that says a man walks up to a woman and says “would you sleep with me?” and she looks offended and says “no!” and he says “okay, would you sleep with me for $1,000,000?” and she says “well, of course!” and he replies with “now that we’ve established what kind of woman you are, let’s talk price.”
Integrity isn’t something you can buy or sell. You’ve either got it, or you don’t. Some people will never, ever believe that I could say positive things about Walmart without being paid for it. Some people would never believe you if you told them that I could be bought out by anyone. The first sort? Will always believe that paid/sponsored blogging events are wrong and evil and biased. The second sort will not.
It’s not about whether or not marketers will move into social media on this level – it’s about whether or not you believe the individual bloggers they work with have integrity or not. If you do? Then if that blogger gives a positive review, you’re more likely to check it out. If you don’t? Then the retailer is spending their money unwisely.
~GeekMommy
You are damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Wait, where is the damned if you don’t?
How would have denying participation in Walmart’s program have damned you? It wouldn’t have. But by participating you get pageviews, twitter exposure, and one lifetime reader (the winner). Sure you weren’t paid (and even worse if you were), but all of this all translates into exposure ,which translates into revenue and anyone with an account on blogger and adsense knows it. Hell, anyone on the internet today knows it. This is where sustainability with this model is going to fail. It won’t be long till every mommy blog and SME guru will be considered a schister.
link bait is dead. long live link bait.
“The average mainstream blog reader doesn’t know the different(sic) between paid shill and unbiased, authentic reviews.” Give us some fucking credit.
This was a great post. I have to say I agree with pretty much everything you said. This whole mess isn’t a big deal today, but it’s a huge deal in the long term. If the big guys are actually biting at this they are going to drown and the bulletin boards, ning communities, youtube channels, micro-communities, will become that much stronger. I have yet to decide if the long term detriment with be localized (per blog) or global (a la blogosphere) but the effect will be negative. This will be fun to watch. Actually it already is.
Um, try again – you’re damned if you get paid, damned if you don’t.
Good to see that you were paying such close attention.
You also must’ve missed that part about not being able to buy someone with integrity – but since you commented Anonymously, that’s not too surprising now, is it?
~GM
Oh and since you seem to need the clarification? Try re-reading the part where I explained what “damned if you don’t” means. It doesn’t mean ‘you get no benefits’ it means other people damn you with critiques like ‘you’re setting all bloggers back’.
Sorry, just didn’t need to waste my time coming back to point that out *after* you tried and failed to understand it a second time.
Whoa whoa whoa. That wasn’t an attack on you. I’m not saying you have done anything wrong. I’m trying to explain to you why some of your readers may be thinking some of the negative things they do about your association with walmart.
It’s very apparent some of your readers didn’t like it. It’s also very apparent you’re sensitive about it. I suggest you think of reasons (or listens to others ideas) on reasons why some readers might not like the contest and adjust accordingly (both you and walmart). Now that would be some good marketing.
I give up. You’re not reading clearly.
No one has commented that my or Nickelodeon’s contest (for a Walmart gift card) is inappropriate. It is only people who comment on other blogs, like you, my anonymous ‘friend’ who like to cast stones at anyone blogging who affiliates themselves in any manner with a retailer. Only usually, they have the guts to put their names to it.
Walmart is doing good marketing – they do it transparently, openly, and honestly. Which is more than I can say for your comments.
Good night and good luck to you.
Allen
Really, really great post, it was worth waiting for.
The risks that you thinks I missed are the same risks that I mentioned in the post actually.
In the risks under bloggers, I made it clear that “authenticity’ is required for it to be success, which you spell out in far greater detail. You bring up some good points about how un-authentic content will damage the brand –I said the same thing about the blogger –since it’s created by the blogger, it’s tied
I’m surprised that you’re surprised, as I said the same thing you did.
the brand stands more to lose than the blogger does.
Great story for social media marketing practice