The web enables us to listen to music, watch tv shows and follow the latest news all without paying a cent. But while things are slowly but surely becoming free, I still believe people are willing to pay for certain value propositions.

Image courtesy of laffy4k

I believe the following 5 things are uniquely profitable in a world of free:

1. Convenience

People are inherently lazy. If you make their lives easier, they will pay you for it.

There are several ways to listen or download music for free, yet people are still paying for songs via iTunes or amazon.com. Why? Because of how easy it is to find and download music on those sites. People value their time more than the 99 cents per download. If you make things convenient and easy people will pay.

2. Quality

Price ensures a more serious and interested clientele. There are many online forums that are free (i.e. Sitepoint, DPreview), but there are also a handful you need to pay for to access (i.e. Webmasterworld, SomethingAwful, metafilter). I believe the reason people are willing to pay for those online communities is because the quality of the content is better. There is a higher signal to noise ratio. This same premise applies to dating sites. People will pay for membership to online dating sites, as opposed to finding dates through any number of free social networks.

3. Additional Functionality

Many websites give consumers just enough services to whet their pallets, and then charge for more functionality or more services, also called the "freemium model." Notable examples include the 37 Signals‘ product offering, Flickr’s Pro Account, and Skype.

4. Customization

Wordpress.com is a great example of this. They provide anyone the ability to have their own personal blog for free however they charge for the ability to customize the CSS or a the blogs domain name for additional fees. Smugmug is another example.

5. Privacy

People still value keeping their private information private. To protect their identity people are willing to pay GoDaddy an extra fee when registering a domain name to ensure the address remains undisclosed.

What do you value enough that you are willing to open your wallet for?

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Note 1: I would like to delve into this further and have proposed a talk for next year’s SXSW conference on this topic. If this discussion is of interest to you, I welcome any feedback and would appreciate your vote.

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Kevin Kelly, Wired Magazine’s cofounder, has a really great list of attributes he asserts are "better than free." These qualities people will pay for in a digital age and include:

1. Immediacy
2. Personalization
3. Interpretation
4. Authenticity
5. Accessibility
6. Embodiment
7. Patronage
8. Findability

I asked my twitter followers and received some interesting suggestions:

* accessibility
* silence
* beauty
* freedom
* peace of mind
* respect
* attention

Any other ideas?

This column was provided by Michael Galpert, co-founder of NY-based Aviary. Aviary is a suite of rich internet applications geared for artists of all genres.

Thanks for your patience during the transition – more to come later tonight.

Update: The changes are now complete. This weekend I will share details of the changes both on the front and back-end. Everything should work and commenting should be easier than before – give it a try and please let me know if you run into any issues. I will be working to correct lots of small issues with URLs and other links.

Thanks for your patience during this very brief transition time.

Product Manager Derek Tumolo noted on Twitter that at least 8 people were fired and what we’ve heard is that the total number is much higher. Many were visibly angry out on the street. We are also hearing that there are security guards stationed outside their headquarters building.

I have calls and emails into as many of the staff at TheLadders as I could find. I have not heard back yet but will update this story once I do.

If you are new to TheLadders, they offer a job board exclusively for jobs over $100,000/year. They earn revenue by charging employers for job postings and applicants for searching and applying. Here’s a video demo I captured with CEO Marc Cendella.

Update: Peter Kafka from AllThingsD was able to get the following quote from TheLadders:

“While demand for our service remains strong and we continue to grow, we regularly assess our business and the economic environment around us to ensure we remain a healthy, strong growing company. Given the current economic environment, we have made some adjustments, which includes a reduction in workforce. TheLadders.com is taking these steps to position the company for long term success.”

Pontiflex describes their service as, "offering advertisers the opportunity to purchase high-quality customer leads via brand-specific banner and direct response ad units. These ‘marketing leads’ generated via the Pontiflex platform represent potential customers who have voluntarily opted in to receive advertisers’ messages."

David Kaplan at PaidContent has more on the transaction. David discusses the difference between marketing leads and sales leads and spoke with Pontiflex CEO Zephrin Lasker regarding transparency and the company’s opt-in methods.

As social aggregators like Friendfeed continue to grow in popularity, there are two basic types of users: passive and active. Once you create a Friendfeed account and add some feeds to it, you are now a passive user. Regular commenting and/or clicking the "like" button on threads moves you into active status. The other categorization puts a user into either the publisher category or the user category (you could fall into both categories). Publishers are looking to get as much traffic out of a service as they can while users are there to be part of a community.

If we look at the old style of forums, you basically had to be an active user. There was no other way to participate and even then it wasn’t easy as pimping your own stuff was typically a no-no. In the new world of forums 2.0 (i.e Friendfeed), you are welcome to pimp your own work as heavy as you like.

Let’s assume that one (or more) of the major tech bloggers has not already created an account (either as passive or active) on Friendfeed. Now he or she creates and account and adds feeds for their blog, videos, photos, etc. Because they are a big name in the tech world, people instantly begin to follow him/her on Friendfeed. Basically the work for that blogger is now done as a publisher. They will enjoy having their content shared, liked and commented on by other Friendfeed active users and will receive additional traffic to their blog.

I am not sold on why publishers who are using social aggregators as traffic drivers should participate. How does it benefit their blog? In fact, I wonder what percentage of high-profile bloggers signed up for a Friendfeed account early on, used it for a few days and then left but are still "participating" via other users.

In addition, if you are questioning how they might participate in conversations on the social aggregators around their content – there’s an easy answer for that. Commenting services like Disqus and blog plugins are pulling comments from Friendfeed back into the publisher’s blog. So it makes sense that the publisher comment on his/her blog and have their readers benefit from the responses. And services like Backtype will feed the comments back into their Friendfeed account, completing the loop.

Naturally for Friendfeed to grow, they need to register more active users not passive publishers. But if these passive publishers don’t participate on other blogs, what makes you think they will participate on Friendfeed? I do believe that everyone should have a Friendfeed account and participate as a passive publisher. There’s just no reason not to.

Monthly book rental plans start at $9.99 for 2 books at a time (in batches) all the way up to $47.99 for 15 books at a time (which circulate in multiple orders). Basically the $9.99 means you get two books, you send back two and then they send two more. The multiple orders means you can send back one of the two and get one more and never be without a book.

Audiobook CDs and MP3-CDs rental pricing begins at $22.49/month and goes up to $62.49/month. There are also plans that mix books and CDs.

I did notice that their rotating production offering (displayed below) does not actually work – I wonder if they have lost any customers because the "Sign Up" button doesn’t click to anywhere. With the popularity of Twitter, they might look at allowing their customers to tweet which books they have rented. 

The Avid Reader blog has a good review of the service. BooksFree notes that their library has over 170,000 total titles for rent. For heavy readers, it looks like a convenient service and you have a better chance of actually receiving the specific book you want unlike the public library. Now if they offered technical books, that’d be hot. Of course those change so often, there’s probably no market for renting developer manuals, etc.

Ignighter

Ignighter has relaunched their group dating website today. The company is calling the updates "version 2" which includes an update to functionality and site design. It also looks like they have redesigned their logo. Co-founder Adam Sachs noted regarding the update, "One new feature that Ignighter is excited to unveil is the world’s first group matching engine. The site has developed an algorithm that determines compatibility between groups of friends rather than just individuals. This will help Ignighter suggest groups for you and your friends to go out with."

Ignighter has also updated their groups function to allow users to follow updates for groups they subscribe to. Adam tells me that their groups function is similar to following someone on Twitter.

Their other update regards their blog and I think it’s a smart move. They are adding more industry-related content to the blog in addition to site updates. This will help keep readers coming back and over time Ignighter might be able to convert them into trial users of the Ignighter dating service.

Check out my video interview with the Ignighter founders to learn more about the service.

Buddy Media

Buddy Media has announced the launch of Builder today. Buddy Media describes Builder as, "a proprietary Social Media Development Platform—the industry’s only such platform to standardize and enable rapid deployment of branded social media applications across all social networks."

Buddy Media builds "app-vertisements" which are basically applications build on social networks including Facebook and MySpace. Builder allows customers to build app-vertisements that can be updated easily when the networks make changes to their platforms.

Check out my video interview with Buddy Media CEO Mike Lazerow.

BootUp NYC

Another event has been added during Entrepreneur’s Week this month. BootUp NYC will be held on April 22 at Webster Hall. Tickets are $5 and it seems to be a very long program running from 6:30pm to the wee hours of the night. Speakers include David S. Rose and Sanford Dickert. There will also be a variety of DJs and drink specials throughout the night.

(note: we are a media sponsor of Entrepreneur’s Week although not for this event)

Apparently some publishers in the pubCenter beta report better performance than with AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network. I can’t comment on the results as I don’t use pubCenter but as with any ad network, pricing can fluctuate on each individual ad click.

Check out my video interview with YieldBuild CEO Paul Edmondson.

I reported on the launch of Entrecard’s ad program back in March and figured I would take it for a spin. You can purchase advertising starting at $25 in either CPC or CPM format. You upload a banner sized in the typical blog format of 125×125. From there you select a category — I selected the business category. There’s no targeting past the category selection. The ad went live about 24 hours later.

I’ve posted the results chart below directly from the Entrecard site. Here are the stats for my $25 ad purchase purchased under the 30 cents CPM option:

• 87982 impressions
• 550 clicks
• 0.0063 clickthru rate
• total orders = 0

The campaign resulted in zero total orders – I can use this metric because my startup charges a fee and isn’t based on pageviews like a blog might be. The interesting part that’s not computed at this point is how many of the 550 visitors have I at least opened the door to — meaning they will come back and order at a later date or share my service with someone else who will.

During the campaign Entrecard raised their baseline ad prices – doubling the CPM price from 30 cents to 60 cents. What’s interesting is that they doubled my balance at the time of the price change – a very classy move – so for this campaign the price increase didn’t affect the overall stats.

From my perspective, Entrecard ads seem very similar to buying ads on StumbleUpon using their Sponsored Stumbles program. Entrecard ads are less expensive than Sponsored Stumbles although the StumbleUpon program can lead to additional unpaid traffic via users who hit the "thumbs up" button on the StumbleUpon toolbar.

Of course note that with any ad program there are many factors to consider. My service is a completely paid service – perhaps a free service would work better for the Entrecard publishers and visitors. My suggestion with any ad network you are considering using is to run a small test similar to the one in this example. This gives you a chance to see if the publisher traffic is a good match for your product or service. 

The company has raised $33 million to-date and is based in Los Angeles. The company opened a NYC office last November. Check out our interview with founder and CEO Frank Addante.

I wonder if any of the money will be focused on increasing publisher revenue for small-to-medium websites. To-date I haven’t heard from any publishers in that category who have seen good results from using Rubicon. The service seems to work well for large publishers, but optimizing those are relatively easy. Especially to get them from where they were to a new level – it’s seeing continued growth that’s more difficult.

One of the things I like that Rubicon does is provide their Ad Market report each quarter. While the data only comes from publishers using their system, it’s a great way to keep their name top-of-mind as some amount of bloggers will post findings from the report each quarter.

And every 3 seconds, a new app rears its shiny little head to offer centralization, aggregation, and status- or file-pushing for the dozen or more profiles and sites maintained by the average user.

For profile whores (guilty!), these sites tempt with promises of the ultimate tool for managing your online presence in a cohesive way, assembling the fragments of data into a unified front for your personal brand. Forgoing any commentary on the narcissism and navel-gazing of a fruitless generation, I’ll limit my overarching criticism of these services to two main points: They’re not sticky, and they cause redundancies.

With regard to my first point, it’s very common (for me, at least) to sign up for a still-in-beta site after being digitally flirted with across a few channels, only to discover that the range, scope, usability, and urgency (what I’d call the addictiveness factors) of the offering weren’t compelling enough to prompt return visits.

As for the second point, we’ll get into more specific detail in the reviews below; let it suffice to say that I’m connected to most friends across several networks. If you or I use a status-pushing or file-pushing service, I’m getting the same message from you on Twitter, Facebook, and likely the aggregating site, as well. And no one wants to see your TwitPics of breakfast three times in a row.

“But that’s not how it works!” you may cry. “Site X eliminates your need to go to those other sites!”

Welcome to the real world. Like most users, I still occasionally have to visit Facebook; and I even (gasp!) still use the Twitter.com web interface. So until your Super Magical Candy Mountain stream-aggregating site gains critical mass and actually fulfills its brand promise of being “the only social site you’ll ever need to use,” redundancies are an unfortunate fact, both redundancies in content and redundancies in services offered. In other words, don’t pitch your site as “the ultimate contact address book.” I’ve already got one, and it’s already got the critical mass to live up to that promise (here’s looking at you, Zuckerberg). Likewise, building an independent microblogging function into your service is pointless on top of pointless; God already made Twitter once.

Now, let’s get on with the roast!

FriendFeed: Like a Mao Suit for Your Social Streams.

The granddaddy of aggregators, FriendFeed is more commonly known by its street name, “Scoble’s lapdog.”

The ‘Feed pushes updates to Twitter, rounds up links you like, streams activity in any feed reader, and even generates a nice little widget for your blog or site. From FriendFeed, you can post text, photos, or links; you can also grab other RSS feeds and insert them in your stream.

The three problems I’ve had with FriendFeed since the Scoble pimping began are that it’s butt ugly (no objections, right?) and that it totally typifies the two abovementioned overarching objections.

Customization: Gives new meaning to the term “absolute zero.”

Content Posting: You can comment on and “like” posted updates or links, and you can share links through a bookmarking function. You can also post text and photos. Rather thorough!

Mobile Functionality: Email, MMS, and an “iPhone-optimized interface.”

Roasted: Well done, but could’ve been done much better. “Mmmm” for “missed opportunity.”

Chi.mp: Hollered Beta.

Chi.mp gives the best vanity URLs of any social site. Username.mp. So simple. So easy to remember. And the user interface stands out as one of the prettiest, most fleshed-out in its class. Still, customization is minimal; I can’t even suss out how to change my avatar. I’m guessing it’ll change when I update my Facebook avatar, but shouldn’t that be a bit more intuitive?

Also, the idea of “personas” has been employed to some effect here. Mom and your boss and your Friday night crew all get to see different sides of you, on the web as in life. But shouldn’t we have the ability to decide how many personas we get to have? And how do we know which users see which content? O’Dell is confused on this point; it seems like a great and necessary but complicated concept.

I can’t offer praise for Chi.mp’s “mini blog” or photo upload functions; on my profile, they push updates to Facebook and Twitter, but not to WordPress or Flickr, which would be the more intuitive choices and would eliminate the need for visiting other sites to repost redundant content. I also question the usefulness of the email forwarding; I can set up whatever@jolieodell.mp and have those messages forwarded to my Gmail account, but… Why?

And why in god’s sweet name do I have to fill out a profile for personal and professional information when the site’s already syncing with my Facebook and should be able to do the same with my LinkedIn? After bitching on said point on Twitter, Anthony from Chi.mp kindly “hollered beta,” admitting there’s still a lot of work to be done.

Customization: I can pick one of a few backgrounds. Or even a solid color.

Content posting: Mini-blogs and photos which update to Facebook and Twitter.

Mobile Functionality: Uuuuh…

Roasted: Rare, but keep cooking. Put that shrimp back on the barbie, or whatever it is they say in New Zealand.

Retaggr: Thanks for the Widget.

Retaggr is a pure-as-the-driven-snow aggregator. Your custom URL is your social web “business card,” so to speak. Your Retaggr card can be emailed, tweeted, pinged, etc.; and the Retaggr widget makes a handy all-in-one stream feeder for your blog or website. Heck, even I use it. It also gives you a nifty ClicktoAdd.Me URL that allows users to quickly peruse their Internet-stalking options and (in some cases) instantly connect to you across those social sites.

But the widget’s rather ugly, the profile page is useless, and the functionality is limited. As a result, the odds  you’ll forget about the site shortly after you sign up are pretty high.

Customization: Users can choose themes, backgrounds, colors, and a vanity URL.

Content Posting: None; this baby’s a pure aggregator. You can tag images, but only on Retaggr-enabled sites.

Mobile Functionality: See above; so, none.

Roasted: Throw it on the coals and douse it in lighter fluid. It’s done.

Pixelpipe: Actually Doesn’t Suck!

For some cosmic/hormonal reason, I hated the Pixelpipe live demo I saw last week at SF New Tech. After TechCrunch’s review, I spewed some bile into the comments section about how there are already too many value-free aggregating/status pushing services and went on with my life. I now must nibble lightly on my words; Pixelpipe doesn’t suck.

The suprisingly simple three-click process for adding most “pipes” is among the fastest processes I’ve seen yet. Unfortunately, it’s giving me unidentifiable technical problems with pushing status updates to Facebook (mystery error message FTW?), and double-posting to TwitPic/Twitter (see the all-important redundancy note at the beginning of this gargantuan post). And I still can’t get the background image upload form to work.

Customization: Allows for custom or colored background/headline on a hosted page; but so far, I haven’t been able to make that work.

Content Posting: Uploads status updates/microblogs, photos, videos, audio, and other files; then pushes the content to any relevant social sites you’ve linked.

Mobile Functionality: Email, MMS, an iPhone app, an Android app, etc. Seems poised for mobile greatness.

Roasted: Medium rare. Stick a fork in it and send feedback to @brettb.

Cliqset: Back to the Drawing Board, Kids.>

This is literally the profile I forgot I had. I tried to sign up for a beta invite, only to discover my username had already been taken… by me.

Even the Cliqset blog seems confused on what the hell Cliqset is supposed to do. The product is unfocused and, currently, it doesn’t… do… anything. Wait, is that even possible?

Oh, right, it’s the social web. Ninety percent of these “revolutionary platforms” don’t do anything.

Cliqset, however, is particularly offensive, spurning existing aggregation services and data portability while offering the most grandiose and amibitious plan to offer users a single social identity on the web.

Unfortunately, Cliqset neither gathers data from my other social sites, nor does it push my updates to my existing profiles. Guess what it is? Just another microblogging service, but with less functionality and no mass of users.

Customization: None.

Content posting: Status updates that go nowhere outside Cliqset.com

Mobile Functionality: Kill me now.

Roasted: You can’t roast a turd.

Posterous: Emailing Like It’s 1996.

The setup process (sending an email to post@posterous.com) was delightfully novel, leading me to a super simple two-button service-adding process for linking my Posterous account to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, the ol’ blog, and… and…

Oh, wait. I guess that’s it.

No support for Last.fm, YouTube, Vimeo, Plurk (hah, ok, that was a joke), or anything like that. Users can send email to help@posterous.com to suggest more services.

Posterous offers an interesting bookmarking function for quick posting and commenting, and users can control what gets posted where by specifying an email address (Twitter-only posts go to twitter@posterous.com; but what if you want an update to go only to Twitter AND Facebook without having to send two emails?).

Overall, the functions are all tied to email and limited accordingly (good luck uploading that 3 minute video clip, dude!), and the “meh” factor is high.

Customization: I get to choose my avatar.

Content Posting: Borderline CMS-y. Can post videos, audio, photos, and text to a blog.

Mobile Functionality: If you can email from your phone, you’re golden.

Roasted: Medium. The blog part is tasty, but the constant repetition and redundancy can be a bit tough and chewy.

And that’s the lot!

Who did I miss? Did I leave out your startup? Do you have a better idea?

Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen a number of stories that were just plain wrong. We saw it with the distributed user information by Last.fm. More recently we saw it with Jeremiah Owyang making claims about Mzinga which he had to later publicly apologize for. But the damage was still done – to what level is unknown.

This morning I read a post by Marshall Kirkpatrick from Readwriteweb which is titled, "How to Sell Your Soul on Twitter and Who’s Buying". The post describes that major Internet companies like Apple and Google along with Internet startups like Box.net are buying Twitter messages in a paid post style using the Magpie service. Marshall notes, "These popular companies just couldn’t resist paying off Twitter users to put advertisements into their Twitter streams using the new pay-per-tweet service Magpie." And he concludes with, "And to the advertisers out there – is this cynical scheme the best you can do to engage with all the new ways people are communicating online? That’s pretty bad."

Just one problem with his post that I caught immediately before I even finished and it seems his commenters also picked up on immediately as well. He is wrong. Very wrong.

It’s not the actual companies buying Twitter messages. The messges are bought by affiliates who try to grab quick income by pushing out their affiliate codes everywhere they can. There’s no real way for anyone running an affiliate program to catch all of the bad affiliates before they start spamming the world with their affiliate code. I know Commission Junction spends a lot of time on making sure they remove as many of the spammers as possible. You can’t hold what affiliates do against the company except in some very rare circumstances.

Mark Hopkins has similar thoughts regarding the story.

Marshall has since added a note that has no highlighting nor is an apology for jumping the gun without researching. I sure hope he (or Richard MacManus, the blog owner) will fix the story to, at a minimum, make the update stand out. Frankly the story should be deleted or completely reworked.

Now here’s where it gets worse for the affected brands. Marshall’s story hit the Digg frontpage (which means massive traffic for RWW) and has since been linked to by a number of sources. For example, CBS Interactive’s BNET site has a story written by Erik Sherman where he continues the misreporting. It’s shocking that a MSM site like BNET didn’t actually check out the links before they posted their article.

Update: Erik notes in his post that he did click the links, "Allen, but I spent a chunk of time clicking through links and seeing where they ended up."

So even if Marshall deletes or makes major changes to the story, how do we make sure all of the other writers also update? Everyone get a story wrong from time to time, the key is how it’s handled.

With more and more blogs needing more and more pageviews to stay afloat, will this trend of pushing out stories as quickly as possible continue? I certainly hope not.

Now let me get dead serious for a minute… what if it instead of Box.net, the story was about your startup?

I am going to work on a list of tips on how to handle when a blogger or journalist (including myself) gets it wrong.

HTML Experts

First we had HTML experts. This batch of experts started appearing in the mid-90s and claimed to be able to code any webpage to the provided design specifications. This was also the time when many WYSIWYG programs began to appear including Microsoft’s Frontpage. It was always interesting to meet people who said they were experts and when you asked if they hand-coded their webpages, the answer many times was that they use Frontpage. Naturally any expert should be able to code HTML by hand.

My favorite story from this expert era was during an interview I was conducting to hire a HTML coder for the agency I was at. I wrote several exams for recruiters who wanted to test their candidates before sending them onto an agency or company for hire. One morning I met with a man who told me he had been coding HTML for 15 years. I explained that HTML wasn’t around for 15 years but he remained stern in tone that he was sure he had been practicing his craft for over a decade. I gave him my beginner exam and he failed. He then explained that he was an expert at Frontpage and that he could code any webpage using the tool. We never heard from him again.

It seemed like HTML experts were mostly located in the U.S. initially and then towards the later years the offshore crowd joined in.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Experts

The next crop of experts popped up in the very late ’90s and early ’00s. This was a much more vocal group of experts because they would send you emails explaining how they can raise your ranking in Yahoo, Altavista, Excite and Google. From the stories I’ve heard over the years, most times the shingle would go up, the company would grab some quick cash and then move on to a new shingle.

It seemed like many of the SEO experts operated from outside the U.S. from the beginning. Unlike HTML where offshore started late, with SEO they got to the gold quickly. We still see many expert SEO workers these days but the count has certainly dropped from the peak.

Social Media Experts

This is our current crop of experts – the social media expert. This seems to be the youngest batch of experts to-date in terms of age. So far, social media experts seem to be following the HTML expert trend with a heavy presence in the U.S.

It seems like if you can get a story on the Digg frontpage, you can slap the expert tag on your online profiles. If you slap a camera on your head for a day and get some press, you are a social media expert. If you can make a video that gets some views, you are a social media expert. If you use Tweetdeck, you are most certainly an expert!

Try this experiment – go to Twitter, randomly pick a person. Then starting from that person, randomly select another person from the profile icons on the right side of the page. Do this 50 times and see how many profiles include the word expert in them. It’s a fun experiment which should open your eyes to the massive expertise out there.

Next week I will share my "test" to see if the person your company or startup has engaged (or plans to engage) to help with social media marketing is actually an expert.

Conclusion

When I met with Scott Monty from Ford yesterday, one of the things we agreed on is that you should never call yourself an expert. Let others think and talk about you as an expert. It will be interesting to see where the experts pop up next online although I am pretty confident the social media experts won’t be going anywhere for the next 2-3 years.

So what does Jason Calacanis, founder of Q&A service Mahalo, think about the concept of framing? Appears he hates it when Facebook does it but loves it when Digg does it.

Facebook:

Digg:

A number of bloggers and journalists covering the launch and one post from Steven Hodson caught my eye. He called the program, "the ultimate social media experiment". As I do with all paid post campaigns, I questioned if any of the 100 would actually post negative comments about the car. This experiment as Steven calls it is slightly different than your normal paid review, but I believe it’s still in the same family. I also wonder how the income associated with this experiment will be reported (sorry old accounting hat on momentarily). Ford global communications team member Scott Monty commented that the people in this program are allowed to say whatever they want whenever they want. Scott went on to reply to another commenter noting, "if you think – for one second – that Ford is telling these people what to say or that we’re only looking for glowing reviews, I want some of what you’re smoking." Probably not the best way for a Ford executive to talk to a potential customer.

After reading Scott’s comments and learning that he was in NYC today, I asked to meet with him to learn more about the program and have him answer some of my questions. We met this morning at the Javits Center where the International Auto Show is set to begin in a couple of days. Side note, I posted a bunch of photos of some exotic cars on Flickr this afternoon. I enjoyed the conversation and while there’s no doubt that Scott and I disagree about whether this program is equivalent to any other paid post/review campaign, I hope I left him with some things to think about and consider.

The net is that Ford is buying media mentions – if all they wanted was feedback, they would give the people a form and have them submit it. This is more of a PR campaign than it will ever be a social media campaign. Just because you use Twitter or YouTube does not just instantly make it social media. It will be interesting to see how disclosure is handled as well with the 100 digital influencers. Scott says each person is required to disclose – but what about on the social sites? Will every tweet, image uploaded to Flickr or video on Youtube have a note about disclosure? Scott says the media will be tagged but will the average Internet user get that a tag = paid post? This issue of social media disclosure is actually much bigger than this campaign.

Ford will most likely get more honest feedback than a traditional paid campaign because the 100 aren’t doing paid posts for a living like some of the other paid review sites. On those sites, negative can quickly mean no future work – that’s probably not the case here.

A few of the questions with regards to this campaign that Ford will need to analyze are:

• Will Ford be able to move the needle in terms of top of mind awareness for not just the 100 in the program but you and me?
• When they program is over and the Fiesta is in production, will you consider it when you shop for your next vehicle?
• Will your overall impression of Ford change (either better or worse)?

I am glad Ford is running this program. Is it perfect? Certainly not. But it allows us all to discuss the pros and cons and get that much closer to better online marketing programs. As I told Scott, I wish the attorneys at my past employer would have let us move an inch here and there – never happened. I will be watching how this campaign moves forward and you can rest assured my thoughts (unpaid, no car, no gas) will appear here. And I look forward to continuing my industry conversation with Scott in the future.

Check out my video conversation with Scott – I tried not to duplicate the content in this post and in the video.