My good friends who run the Big Blog Company do not like to use Samizdata to promote the Big Blog Company as much as they might, because this is not cool. It is not good blogging practice. But I am only doing this incidentally when I link to the latest posting on their blog. My main purpose is to promote myself, which I suppose is not all that cool either, but there you go.
Said I, here:
A new market is chaotic, and (and this is the point) ignorant. People do not, e.g., know how to spot cowboy operators, or bad products made in all sincerity but badly. Ignorance and foolishness abound, and so to start with, down goes the graph of achievement. . . .
And, back from her tBBC promotional trip to LA, Jackie D said, this very morning, this:
Unfortunately, I wasn’t making it up when I recounted to her how one PR flack we met in LA boasted of how his firm lies to big corporations and promises them good coverage on their “big traffic,” fake blog. The blog itself has been set up by the PR company for the express purpose of scamming companies into paying out substantial amounts of cash for positive postings on it. Looking at the blog, it seems to be authored by an anonymous nobody . . . who just so happens to pepper his commentary with glowing mentions of the PR company’s clients, and negative remarks about their competition.
That is a classic description of how a genuinely new market (as opposed to a made-to-sound-like-a-market governmental rearrangement of a non-market) starts out by working – i.e. not working.
Stay with it guys. In the long run, you will get rich. If you can still be there when the long run starts to run. Eventually all those corporations will start to really understand blogging, and to want help to do the real thing.
To continue my own quote:
. . . But then, if this really is a true market, things bottom out and start to improve and in the longer run the result is a market that is orders of magnitude better . . .
Or, to put it another way:
Link?
This is nothing to do with the development of a new marketplace or who just so happens to pepper his commentary with glowing mentions of the PR company’s clients. It has been standard, if hidden, practice in glossy lifestyle magazines for at least 50 years and probably considerably longer. Take sugar, for example, commonly prsented as the enemy of mankind, sometimes gets an apparently inexlicable highly positive mention in women’s magazines (“taken in moderate amounts, nothing gives you an energy boost quicker than sugar”; “how to use sugar positively to beat that 3pm office depression!” etc). It’s just standard, in some fields, publishling practice applied to a new publishing field. Buyer, as always, beware.
Interesting point – which is cheaper, having good customer service and a good product thus ensuring people talk about it naturally, or paying them to lie about it?
I wonder if anyone’s done any studies. I don’t see people being offered money to ‘positively mention’ companies/products in a social surrounding but perhaps that’s only because there’s no way to check that they’re actually following through.
William Gibson mentioned this in his new book, Pattern Recognition – one of the characters (an attractive woman) is paid to market a product by hanging out in trendy bars and slipping ‘oh have you heard about this new…’ subtly into casual conversation.
I thought it was quite ingenious – we’ll probably see it soon enough, especially as the value of ‘traditional advertising’ has in recent studies found to have dropped massively.
Like none of us have noticed the inexplicable “customer reviews” sections on amazon (and elsewhere) where 10 people say Great! and one curmudgeon says Garbage!
Or how one reviewer goes on and on about the one feature that distinguishes a product from others, which no one else mentions, etc… ad infinitum.
You don’t have to too cynical to imagine creative writing down in the sales department on slow day. Heck some of them might actually be sincere sales hacks.
Way ahead of you there, Harvey:
http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/public/nyt-rob-walker.html