Monday, November 20, 2006

Can Bloggers Be Bought?

Further to my last post, here's a very interesting discussion.
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2 comments:

Debi said...

Fascinating stuff - thanks!

10:29 am
Ms Baroque said...

Thanks Elizabeth, yes, very interesting!

However, this discussion isn't just about books. The advertising departments of corporations all over the world have cottoned on to the fact that they can get product users to gush about their products online much more cheaply than taking out ads etc - this even happens on message boards aimed at kids. We've seen how the music industry is even using MySpace to promote new "products" (i.e., singers) by stealth, creating ersatz pages before new CD's are released. The PR industry is now all over the potential for corporate blogs. And apparently in the US there are companies running huge networks of, for example, girls who hold sleepovers at which they give their friends samples of kid cosmetics etc, while having "girly makeovers" or whatever - and they are supposed to not tell their friends that they're getting something for it.

The publishers are clearly getting in on this act, and are approaching bloggers for the very reasons mentioned by Sutherland the other week - because bloggers are, largely, essentially amateur "product users" more then they are "professionals".

Now, as has been discussed, this can be the very strength of certain kinds of blogs! But I think the blogger-reviewers had better cotton on very fast, and be very canny in their dealings.

Some of the comments on the post you link to are great - some people simply request complimentary copies from publishers in any case. It depends, I think, on how one sees oneself and one's relationship to "the industry."

11:48 am

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