Robert Loch over at up2speed has posted a response to my piece on Blog Relations… three chords and the truth and he disagrees with me:
“Tom also states that trying to pay for false promotion/buzz is a bad idea. Personally I disagree – placing advertising/marketing message on websites as editorial, and having it endorsed/advocated is a great idea – it is getting caught that’s the bad idea.”
Now respectfully, I have to point out this makes no sense to me.
The whole lesson from the Raging Cow episode, and the whole point of my post is that consumers aren’t stupid, you can’t fool all the people all the time. If you’re caught slipping a few bucks in return for “editorial” coverage, then that’s going to be a big negative for the medium (i.e. the blogger) and the message (i.e. the advertiser).
There’s nothing wrong with advertising on blogs but as soon as people can’t trust what they’re reading, well then blogging is no more than advertorial and we all know the value of that particular outlet.
As for it only being a problem when you get caught, well isn’t that the point? The Internet makes everything far more transparent. That’s how the Raging Cow issue arose. They did get caught.
This isn’t the end of marketing. It simply means that marketers need to think more carefully, need to innovate. Throwing dollars at bloggers for surreptitious mentions isn’t exactly the brave new frontier of marketing thought is it?
Murphy's Law 