Mercurial

Everybody seems to have jumped to conclusions on the sudden appearance of Raging Cow on the blogging noosphere, with comments ranging from insouciant to adamant. Some of those were a marketing dream: Pirillo endorsing the product while protesting his innocence.
Anil, on the other hand, is much more on point, more measured, with useful suggestions and a profound discussion on the credibility of the blogger and the repercussions of this type of campaigns and the blogging phenomenon. Tristan proposes full disclosure – yeah, right – as a way to eliminate the possible confusion that this marketing practice may bring, while keeping it as an option for the ones so inclined, while Dave is surprisingly brief about the whole thing. Of course, Doc Searls is always the perfect linker, given that he has so many connections and wide knowledge, but interesting to note that he goes from curious to furious in just a few days. Vegan Porn, much more the activist that I would ever be, has many interesting links regarding milk production – and that only makes me puke – while pointing out that “influential blogger” is an almost empty set, which of course brings forth the notion that any so called i.b. that were to be hawking said sugared milk would be soon defrocked and mocked by the rest of the blogtelligentsia. Tom Coates deals with the ethics of the blog, and whether the whole thing is a superficial discussion, seeing as we are already spoiled, dirtied and soiled, hawking products and scheming ways to boost traffic. Is the ethic blog the new blog?
Couple parodies here and here also pop up, much criticizing the whole thing. But perhaps that was what marketers wanted.
We are bloggers, pure and unfettered, never to bow to the awful worlds of capitalism or profit. Meanwhile, can you click here so I increase my traffic?
This pureness in revolution has been around many times before, and has always evolved into something for everyone, a merely co-opted set of attitudes that endures as long as it embraces massive distribution.
And the genius of the marketing mavens lies in that, precisely, in making all and everyone of us accept these anathemas and incorporating them into our little perception of the world. Temptation, of course, will bend everyone, and in this particular case, it would be very difficult to try to isolate ourselves from being offered rewards by a particular product or service: professional redesign, click-throughs, exposure, traffic, interviews, fifteen second spot on prime TV, etc.
It is probably the next step in this journaling idea: the exhibitionism being rewarded with screen time, with a lot of "am-i-hot-or-not" and like, totally, this is my blog? comments from very-clued-in MTV teens.
What would be your market demographic? Very high content, low quality, closed traffic, junior, high school and first year college students, with a high voice and attitude to match but limited available funds. If you could offer a service offering free hosting, statistics and the like, subject to data gathering and stats belonging to your host, people would accept it in droves, and while not necessarily hawking your product or conducting product focus groups, you could gauge reactions and trends using your demographic, for a fraction of the price it would cost to do otherwise.
More to the point, I suspect that is what is happening with Blogger-Google, where the notion of navigation and links is intrinsically enmeshed with the idea of blogs and peer validation of content.
Again, what if the blogger (the person that blogs, not the company) were to be enticed by fame and fortune? As Tom says, we already hawk Amazon, or beg for money, or have links to MT or blogrolling or whatever hosting we receive. The difference is that the expression of such preferences has its origin within the experience of the blogger – what if the milk is good? And criticism is as well a possibility: That impartiality disappears as soon as you start accepting money, gifts and mousepads with cows in the design: As you became an official whore, you effectively lose the ability to dissent.
But as with any other trend, I am sure that corporate advertising will find its way into blogs in a much more subtle way, simply by taking advantage of the closed circles that the blogging demographic has. Raging Cow has already done this, effectively transforming a press release into news content, and although fighting negative blog reactions, the exposition that they otherwise got with mainstream news outlets has absolutely outpaced any puny reach we may have.
In conclusion – even though we strive for an ethic blog, we have already fell victims to the marketing strategists of Dr Pepper.