The Challenge Rambles and riff raff about all this and that

Riding every single wave

Remember the times when we filled our mouths with the "Social Media Marketing is about Authenticity, Transparency, Straight Talk"? It would seem those days are over, if they were not an illusion in the first place.

David made some criticism over his blog regarding the bloggers (erm, "writers") that will take money from companies to talk ang generate buzz about them. I won't spend too long going through his point, but I'll say that I agree overall.

That post had a trackback from Jeremiah's own blog, where he writes in support of the izea model:

Recent research shows that corporate blogs are not trusted, but we know that consumers trust their peers, so savvy brands will want to benefit from word of mouth.

So, I'll try to use logic to digest as much as I can of this.

People trust peers more than corporate blogs. So, let's pay bloggers to write nice things about companies. Yet, people have higher trust on emails from people they know. What are companies to do? a. pay every single person that has a friend to recommend your brand on an email or b. spoof addresses to make people think their friends are recommending our brand.

Of course someone will eventually find out and users will no longer trust "emails from people they know".

(need I clarify I tried to make a point through absurd?)

Using my crystal ball I can foresee: Programs like this will slaughter blog's credibility the same way miss-use of corporate blogs demised how much people trust them.

It is a program that is bound to fail in the long run. Once people start to be suspicious about if what they read on a blog is being "sponsored by Huge Inc." there's no turning back, since bloggers do not have the leverage mass media has to revert such negative perception.

In a couple of years we'll be gazing at a similar report, looking at blogs standing at the bottom of the trust pit, scratching our heads and wondering what went wrong.

But there are two major issues with this type of study.

1. They tend to generalize
2. They are impossible to compare against other facts and figures.

I agree that 80% of corporate blogs are rubbish. Nothing more than an ill-applied, poorly executed and sad shadow of what a blog should be. I wouldn't trust them myself, and I'm both a blogger (corporate and individual) and a blog-reader.

But there are some awesome examples of decent (and influential) corporate blogging as well. I wonder if that 16% of the people the study showed trusted corporate blogs read the decent ones.To be honest, forrester's report (available for free w/ registration) gives some advice into how to save corporate blogging.

Now, back to the title of the post: "riding every single wave"; that is exactly what (us) marketers are doing wrong. On a couple of speeches I gave this year I underlined that corporate blogging was not suited for every single company ("don't do it because its hot") and that before engaging into it those in charge should be fully aware of how it needs to be done.

(As a general rule of thumb: if your corporate blog pisses some "old school" people within your company, you're doing it just fine).

So, now that the new trend is pay-per-post we'll find tons of companies jumping into that without really knowing who they are paying. Recently I was talking to a local a-list blogger (most probably Argentina's top blogger), a very controversial figure for some, but stainless in terms of ethics. He said "a company that advertises with me should understand that I might criticize them nonetheless". If I managed Argentina's Marketing budget he'd have a Lenovo ad over his site.

Once marketers understand the new game they should realize that some things that look bad on the surface can have a longer lasting possitive effect.

But advertising is different than pay-per-post. Advertising is clear and direct. Pay-per-post is misleading. It doesn't matter if authors disclose, there is still some degree of deceit happening. If a user goes to bigcompany-dot-com he expects that the copy is going to be biased towards what bigcompany sells. If the same user goes to averagejoeopinion-dot-com he expects to read what Joe has to say, not what bigcompany told Joe to say.

The move of advertising pay-per-post can (and will) backfire in the nastiest of ways. Because it is fundamentally flawed as a concept within that other type of marketing that "social media analysts" (I am one) are advocating. One based on openness and honesty. It is not easy to do things the right way, and often it takes a long time to pay off.

Sure, in times of crisis people do welcome some extra cash, but not everyone should become a prostitute for that reason.

To conclude and since Jeremiah spent his time commenting on my previous post on the subject, I'll take the time to reply.

I respect Analyst's work. Half of my time I (should) spend looking at facts and figures, understanding what is happening, what the trends are and how to improve programs.

The main issue I see with analysts is that they see half the picture. The half the people within companies don't see. The main difference is that we know we're missing stuff, we need that information and are willing to pay big bucks in order to get it. On the other hands many analysts tend to think they own an absolute truth.

Another problem I usually have is that some conclusions they draw seem to be a tad short-sighted and shallow. It is only when such type of research goes public and digested by bloggers, marketers and others that the real deal surfaces. Yet, those other people who re-read and re-analyze, share their opinions and expertise don't make a dime out of it. Shouldn't Forrester pay all of them as well? After all, they are making significant contributions to the final studies (sometimes before the study is finished, other times afterwards).