The Buffalo Blog

John and Monty Don do Comic Relief

P1000101
Originally uploaded by buffalo.communications

John goes fund raising in Soho and meets the world famous gardener Monty Don.

He also raised over £100 - here here!

Seedy seeding?

I had an interesting release through yesterday bringing up the ongoing question over blogger advocacy – should bloggers be paid to write about brands? What’s to stop them? What are the issues involved?

 

The press release came from ASUS (the netbook manufacturer) and immediately stuck me as both pretty clever and pretty sneaky all at the same time. The company is basically looking to ‘seed’ bloggers about their new range of netbooks and have launched a ‘competition’ to get the campaign off the ground. All aspiring bloggers have to do is have a free netbook from the company and blog about one of six or seven new netbook models the company is using.

 

While we’ve seen this kind of thing backfire before with bloggers feeling swayed by being ‘given’ free things to write about. But the company is being clever about this. Firstly it’s looking for grassroots bloggers, not to cajole existing writers to big-up the brand. Secondly the company has clearly defined that the initial netbooks are given away free and third that the blogger achieving the most recognition/readers will win the very netbook they’ve been writing about. The company has basically introduced the first (that I know of) seeding metrics – perform and keep, slack and give back (sorry!)

 

I’ve blogged about the whole payment thing before and while the truth is these bloggers aren’t getting ‘paid’ as such, there is still a fair remuneration happening. However, the do need the netbooks being given out to be able to blog effectively wherever they are and, the extra encouragement of obtaining an even better netbook seems a good way of enthusing them to write without overtly paying them. There’s also nothing saying the bloggers can’t lay-into the netbooks although, I cant see the company being to happy about giving away things to someone who’s been slating their products. With the only stipulation being that they must blog, the question of advocacy isn’t that pressing.

 

One important issue though is the problem of getting people to blog about not just a brand but a single product. New posts for, say, a netbook blog are not difficult to think up – but surely, there’s only so much you can write about one netbook…it’s not an MacBook after all.

 

Overall ASUS’s idea seems like a good one but not one that’s destined to succeed. The outlay against possible brand recognition gains is also promising. While I wish I had the time to apply, I don’t. But I’ll be watching with interest how the campaign pans out – successful or otherwise.