As you may have gathered by past Blogs I am deeply fascinated by the social and business changes which are now growing from the changing technologies of, in this case, Web 2.0, and in other areas SOA. Couldn’t resist trying to work out why corporate blogging will fail!

I have been getting interesting comments that have led to an agreement that blogging is about re establishing trust at a personal level, however there are moves out there by corporates’ to move in on Blogging.. On the website ‘blog republic – by the Bloggers, for the Bloggers’, appeared the posting ‘blog republic is looking for Bloggers who are interested in being paid per post’. The post continued ‘we are looking for motivated Bloggers in the following areas; cell phones, broadband, travel, gadgets, health, stocks, and Blogging. We are looking for quality Bloggers who can make insightful posts, the more you post, the more you earn’.
Well at least this takes something that has been happening over the last year into the open. Web Services company Marqui seems to have been one of the first to make a commercial move when last year it offer 20 Bloggers $2400 each to post some thing positive about Marqui once a week for three months. This was followed by Payperpost.com a fully commercial service, and then there is the more interesting case of haveyoursay.com which was LandRover taking over the Blog site of a disgruntled customer and using it to try to improve its customer services interaction.
The reactions from harden pioneering Bloggers was and is predictable, and certainly I am united in agreement with them about any Blog that has a hidden principle. To me that makes it designed to mislead, and therefore devious. Sadly I think it is inevitable growing pain for Blogging, which being a distinctly ‘human’ and ‘current’ activity will change as it develops, and some of those changes will not be for the better. However in real life we seem to manage to ‘see through’ many scams simply because the facts seem implausible, and I think this is what such ‘adverblogs’ will exhibit.
Okay they will have generated enough traffic to drive people there, but then that’s only the same as advertisements in newspapers and magazines, and we all know how we treat them; style, brand, etc all categorise. So why am I so sure that this is going to work for Blogs?
Quite simple because I know from personal experience that to create regularly blog pieces, in my case one a week, require a lot of effort, and thought, much more than I think can be sustained without access to real life experience. So we are back to the principle of the person being the ‘guarantee’ of value, or as it has been said many times; ‘people buy people’. Good Blogging will probably result in searching around the Bloggers name for more of their work, and for bad blogging we need the search engines providers to give us a ‘filter out’ capability.
All of this leads me to conclude that corporations really have grasped the real principle or values of Blogs, and still think in a conventional marketing manner that it’s all about volume and mentions for the corporation, whereas those who read Blogs think it’s about people and experiences that they can relate to. In a services business which is dependant on its people then personal Blogs can be a wonderful way of bring this across, corporate ‘adverblogs’ will be a complete turnoff.
And all of this from someone who is blogging on a corporate site too, but in a strictly personal way!!