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Lies and the Lying Liars Who Blog Them
Excuse me for twisting the Al Franken book title here. But one of the hot topics around the office lately has been the sincerity of bloggers. Business Week's media columnist John Fine has done a great job of documenting some of the more outrageous uses that PR pros have made of the blogosphere. Fine has also reported on the new practice of paying "normal people" to get out and blog away on their "favorite" products. Now, first of all I believe the blogosphere will contract under its own weight in two to three years. We're at eight million blogs and counting. My six year old son wants to start one for goodness sake. But nothing will cause it to buckle faster than the current shill jobs that are happening at legit blogs as well as the rant and rave fringes. If I get on to Paste magazine's blog to rant about the incredible oversight of ranking Neil Young as number two among its top 100 living songwriter list, it's just me expressing myself. I mean, Neil Young has written the same song 200 times, hasn't he? And he checks in seven spots higher than Joni Mitchell? But how do I know that the person who is outraged that Freedy Johnston wasn't listed at all isn't working for Johnston's record company? The unfortunate upshot of all this bloglying is that blogs are an effective customer strategy barometer and customer intelligence machine. It would be a noble quest to keep it honest. Really.
What I wonder is what impact this will have on the companies that use the approach of buying false praise once their customers and prospects discover that they're doing it. The importance of customer trust and transparency in building the kind of loyalty that builds true evangelists is undeniable. Is it worth the risk of destroying customer trust and with it customer value? Are marketers so lacking in creativity that they need to buy false praise?
One colleague made an insightful comparison to TV advertising, saying that people will come to learn which recommendations are genuine and which are paid for. But I don't know that the blogosphere is so obvious. I guess, then, that the old adage is as true today as ever: Buyer beware.
I'd have to agree that keeping blogs 100% on the up and up is indeed a noble quest. But it's not a pragmatic one. Any communication medium that gets as much attention in B2C and B2B circles as blogging does is going to get "monetized" by marketers and PR at some point. And that is not necessarily a bad thing. When we watch television, we do not take every ad at its word or at face value. As blogs continue to take off, the same state of affairs will take shape. And in a market where channels abound and the consumer's attention is a very hot commodity, who can blame marketers for trying to influence and harness the growing power of the blogosphere?