On Friday last week I wrote about why bloggers hate marketers. I can’t tell you the number of articles I’ve read about marketers who simply don’t understand bloggers and how awful most marketers are at trying to utilize bloggers as promotional instruments.
What none of these bloggers talk about, however, is the subject of why marketers hate bloggers.
I’m not in the mood to write out any lengthy anecdotes this morning, so I’m going to stick with a simple list.
3 Reasons Why Marketers Hate Bloggers
- Some demand bribes – In Lifehack’s “How to Get a Blogger to Promote Your Product” the author mentions that bloggers like to receive gifts, but not bribes, from companies that want reviews for their products. What the author doesn’t mention is how many bloggers will demand some form of payment up-front. “Oh that’s cool, want me to mention how your software can actually solve many of the IT problems that I often write about? Maybe if you comped me a free site license I’d consider it…”
- Some bad reviews become vendettas - If someone from the New York Times or the Washington Post gave one of my products a bad review they probably wouldn’t log onto Amazon, copy and paste the bad review and give me 0 stars, repeat the exercise for CNet, Yelp, and so on. They wouldn’t log-on to Twitter and tweet about their bad experience with my product, and so forth. Some bloggers act vindictively when they have a bad experience. If you take a look at some of the bad reviews I’ve given you’ll notice that my bad review starts and stops with Marketing Ninja.
- Some write reviews with a clear, personal bias - Reviews are meant to be an objective account of one user’s experience with a product; a number of bloggers don’t fundamentally understand the concept of “reviewing a product on its own merit.” I’ll read reviews of new product offerings by Dell or Microsoft and somewhere towards the middle of the article I’ll read “yes, Popfly is a moderately average web service but Vista still sucks and the anti-competitive practices of Microsoft have set the software industry back two decades.” What does Vista have to do with Popfly? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Many bloggers can’t shake off the old habit of writing things from a purely personal angle and in the process end up writing a review that is simply unfair. Vendettas against companies, previous product offerings, and resentment about prior experiences with the producer in question should be left at the door when reviewing a product.
What are the other reasons why marketers hate bloggers? Feel free to add to this list.
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Comments 5
I’m not sure if this counts as “one reason” but I’d think the tendency for bloggers to be unreasonable ranks pretty high. I still vividly remember how Amazon’s Kindle got panned for not having multi-touch (a feature Apple had introduced just a few weeks earlier).
I guess that might fit into your #3 but I tend to think it goes beyond that in many ways. To give an example, is it personal bias that Mike Arrington of Techcrunch hates any service that charges for music just because he believes all music should be free? It seems like that almost goes above personal bias to the point that it should be called something else.
The truth is, I’ve always been unsure to what extent marketers should embrace the blogging community. There’s really no way of knowing how they’ll react or what motivates them to react in the way they do and since they all link to each other you risk destroying your Google results if things go the wrong way. If you ignore them at least they can only bash you for that.
Posted 10 Jun 2008 at 12:19 am ¶Hey Tom,
Arrington’s bias against the music industry is a good example of my third point.
I thought of another one when I was driving home the other day – accoutability. If someone at a news paper writes a review that is false or obviously untruthful then your company can have its complaints heard by the publisher itself. When the propreitor is the same person as the author, like most bloggers, then the only people that you can hold the reviewer accountable to are the blogger’s readers and they probably can’t hear you in the first place.
Posted 11 Jun 2008 at 12:18 pm ¶I see nothing wrong with making money from your blog, as long as money making is not the main reason for blogging. If you provide useful and valuable content to your readers you can make an income from it as well by having some monetizing.
Posted 16 Jun 2008 at 5:30 am ¶Tom,
I agree – some of the ways bloggers go about making money on their blogs simply contradicts the “blogging ethos” that many endorse so self-righteously. That’s all that I was pointing out.
Posted 17 Jun 2008 at 10:53 am ¶Please don’t think this is the case with ALL bloggers. I do product reviews. I never ask for money and I am honest with my reviews. I recently reviewed a game and I honestly thought it was too hard to figure out at first and I posted that in my review. I came out and said due to the complex nature of the game I wouldn’t recommend it for younger kids. I never got a dime from the review, just the game which I plan on donating to a local women’s shelter.
So not ALL bloggers are bad and not ever experience with a product review is bad either.
Just my .02 cents.
Posted 16 Nov 2008 at 5:54 pm ¶Post a Comment