Sean Corcoran

Forrester’s report is eight pages and $750 worth of “Why You Should Pay Bloggers To Talk About Your Brand,” filed under a less ominous sounding phrase “sponsored conversations.” Sean Corcoran sums up his expensive treatise this way:

Kmart gave some bloggers a free shopping spree in exchange for a blog post about the experience — a practice we call sponsored conversation. With appropriate protections for disclosure and authenticity, this practice will take its place alongside public relations and advertising activities in the blogosphere. Marketers should take advantage of sponsored conversation as an entrée into the online conversation.

Chris Brogan

The Kmart example recalls a controversial post from new media marketing guru Chris Brogan, who accepted a $500 shopping spree in exchange for blogging about his experience. Brogan disclosed the sponsorship at the top of the resulting post. Charges were flung immediately about how his participation damaged his overall blogger credibility and authenticity. After a long rebuttal where he is an admitted PayPerPost convert and former stone-thrower himself, Brogan gave critics permission to read someone else.

“I’m here to share insights and give you actionable strategy,” wrote Brogan. “I’m going to explore even more ways that bloggers and media makers can make money in 2009.”

Marshall Kirkpatrick

ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick posted a respectful disagreement with the Forrester report, saying that, “paying bloggers to write about your company is a dangerous and unsavory path for new media and advertisers to go down.” And later, “Blogging is a beautiful thing. The prospect of this young media being overrun with ‘pay for play’ pseudo-shilling is not an attractive one to us.”

Kirkpatrick splits a few hairs in his post, especially regarding whether it is acceptable to allow event sponsors to pay for travel to an event, which ReadWriteWeb has accepted in the past. Such a declaration in rebuttal to the concept of sponsored content is an interesting tack, and makes one wonder how wide the gray area really is.

Jeremiah Owyang

Forrester senior analyst Jeremiah Owyang defends his company’s report, reiterating the importance of transparency and blogger authenticity. “Blogger authenticity means that the blogger should have complete freedom to write in their own voice – even if the content they write about the brand is negative.”

Of course, that stubborn devotion to authenticity could mean the blogger doesn’t get another shot at sponsored conversation money, which sets up a mean Catch 22, one that has existed in media since there has been media.

Brogan returns slamming “the righteous web” and inherent hypocrisy involved in compensated blogging, via AdWords or otherwise. Meanwhile Google’s Matt Cutts draws the line in the search index sand. You might remember Google penalized itself for sponsored conversations recently, and Cutts tears down Forrester’s Kmart example:

"Google found multiple bloggers that violated our quality guidelines and we took corresponding action. Those blogs are not trusted in Google’s algorithms any more."

Cutts once again calls for sponsorship disclosure and paid links that do not pass PageRank.

The resurgence of this conversation is interesting especially because of its odd timing.

Paul Harvey 1918-2009

Paul Harvey died over the weekend, a radio icon said to be older than commercial radio itself. Harvey’s news commentary was always interspersed with sponsored updates so well delivered it was difficult to distinguish where the news stopped and the commercial began—something we generally considered charming, the rest of the story right after Harvey tried to sell you something for your aching joints.

This tension between advertisers and content producers has always existed. Some producers handle it well, others don’t. Some content consumers handle it well, and others don’t. It’s hard to imagine a real justification for changing a model of content delivery that has existed and thrived for at least a century—newspapers currently notwithstanding. Media and advertising depend on one another.

There are abuses on all sides. Advertisers try to exert control over content; consumers try to exert control over advertisers so that they’ll exert control over content; governments try to exert control over content; now search engines try to exert control over content.

There is so much interest in controlling content, the only moral approach to it is to let content producers control their own content at their own risk. Certainly competing content producers will be more than happy to point out their rivals aren’t on the up and up, and if producers are found to be inauthentic or labeled as a marketing channel for a specific brands, consumers can turn the dial, load another webpage, flip the channel in response if they wish. The purists will form their righteous, purism clubs and search engines will go about their usual tasks of sorting it all out.

But are sponsored conversations, paid posts, ad columns, breaks before the rest of the story all wrong? Good luck making that argument stick, and good luck funding good content. 

Reputation Management Advice

Basically the problem with SEO brand management arises when bad press gets into the news websites and then finds its way to ranking high on the SERPs for product and company names. If (and when) this does happen how do you combat such a thing? How can you essentially push down ranking of a pesky blogger or news web page? Here are my Top 10 Reputation Management tips:

1. Try “employing” or offering other bloggers to step up and post about the client. Not so much PayPerPost or Review Me style, but emailing or calling them one by one and doing it the right way.

2. Another idea is to join forums and other websites which require a user name and have a indexable profile page. For instance if you look up my name: “Jaan Kanellis” you will find MyBlogLog Community pages and many other websites that simply list a profile page. Of course your user name has to be the keyword/brand your going after, duh.

3. How about stock quote page? Is this client name/brand/keyword a public company? If so start linking to those stock quote pages from Yahoo and Google Finance.

4. How about getting Social Media websites to help like Yahoo Answers or Google Groups. Once the web page is created start by getting some links pointing to the answer/group page and watch it climb! This really applies to any sort of social media web page that allows you to author your own question/content.

5. How about getting news interviews, podcasts, etc on the subject of brand/keyword live online? Of course these will be primarily authored by the client and positive in nature. Getting the client to do them and making sure the interviewer posts them online is obviously important. Once live you can point to them from many different websites as a resource.

Basically the bottom line of my points above is to utilize already top ranking websites for your own brand benefit, while keeping the end user plenty happy with what they find in the SERPs.

More:

7. Buy, buy, buy domains around your target keyword/brand. Get them live with unique content and offer social interaction/Web 2.0 for visitors. They will rank faster than you can believe.

8. Create another controversy. Well this is very tricky, but rightly constructed it could over power whatever rankings are there now, that are in your way.

9. Try to avoiding the Quixtar route/press:

Quixtar Caught in Search Engine PR Battle

Quixtar Spamming the Search Engines?

10. Make sure your ruling the PPC spots. This can only help protect your brand and will help influence visitors to see who is the real website that they should be visited.

Update:

More solid articles on reputation management:

Ten Ways to Avoid a Google Reputation Nightmare

SEO as your brand watchdog

So what are yours?

Comments

During the conference, CEO Ted Murphy gave the audience a sneak preview of Izea’s new product, SocialSpark; set to launch to the general public sometime in January. SocialSpark follows an eBay like model; that is, they have built a dynamic marketplace that connects buyers and sellers. 

So, who are the buyers and sellers?

In this case, SocialSpark is not necessarily selling a tangible product. Rather, they are providing a marketing and communications platform that connects advertisers to their target consumer groups.  While it could be positioned as a social network for bloggers, I believe it’s more than that because bloggers are not just bloggers. They are real people with real passions, needs and desires. They are moms, dads, sons, daughters, husbands, wives, etc. In other words, they are consumers and they do have circles of influence, both online in the form of their readership; and offline with family, friends, etc. SocialSpark levels the playing field so that brands can have real time, authentic conversations with their customers and/or potential customers.

Conversational marketing at it’s best

Consumers are tired of being bombarded with banner ads about Online Degrees and Online Dating; and nine times out of ten, they don’t even see it anyway. They are tired of being marketed to via pop ups and road blocks; and would rather be communicated with through online conversations. This is one reason blogging is growing exponentially everyday.  Consumers now have a channel to express their thoughts, opinions, recommendations and complaints about the products and services they use.  And, they expect for their side of the story to be heard.  The question is whether marketers are interested in listening. 

SocialSpark addresses this issue straight forward. Marketers can create profiles and interact with the community, as much or as little as they choose; complete with robust analytics that make Google’s product look web 1.0.  And yes, they can also pay bloggers to review their products and/or services (a concept I fully agree with as long as there is disclosure). Marketers will now have a unique opportunity to engage in conversations that are already happening in the market place.

In addition to sponsored content, SocialSpark marks IZEA’s first foray into display advertising by introducing a unique ad unit they call a Blog Welcome. This unit will be attractive to those advertisers who want to engage bloggers, but prefer to have control over the marketing message.

Most likely, SocialSpark won’t have a problem building momentum in the social media space; since IZEA can leverage their current user base of over 90,000 bloggers and 11,000 advertisers. They also promise to launch SocialSpark as an open API for developers and will also be compatible with Google’s OpenSocial.

Summary

The launch of SocialSpark will completely revolutionize the way marketers communicate with their consumers. With the platform being totally open to anyone and everyone, marketers can now participate with honest, open and transparent voices.  OF course, this can be risky with brands being open to mass criticism about their products/services; but there is really no way to avoid it since it will happen anyway with or without their participation.

Tag:

PayPerPost Bloggers Unranked By Google

Ted Murphy has been a lightning rod for criticism ever since the unveiling of PayPerPost, an ad system where bloggers are paid to write about an advertiser. Murphy’s company, now called Izea, fought back against early complaints about non-disclosure by instituting a disclosure policy.

Compared to what happened recently, that brouhaha looks like a minnow compared to what the big fish in the search industry did to PPP bloggers. Murphy blogged that Google had tweaked the PageRank of a number of those bloggers, dropping them to PR 0.

When it comes to finding blogs on Google, PageRank is one of a number of factors used to qualify the authoritativeness, and therefore the placement, of a site or blog in Google’s search results. Higher PR sites tend to rank well, which means people are more likely to find them and visit.

“Once again Google has proved that PR has little to do with blog traffic, influence or relevance and everything to defending their monopolistic stranglehold on search and online advertising,” Murphy said in his post.

He suggested services like PPP and similar competitors offering revenue to bloggers all have a common denominator: they aren’t Google AdSense. Google’s content network of AdSense participants extends the reach of its AdWords ad platform.

Despite the ominous drop in PageRank, it has been suggested that the blogs victimized by the change have not suffered a loss in traffic, according to Tony Hung. “My take on things is that Google wants to make an example out of Izea,” he wrote.

Traffic may not be impacted today, but the effects of the dramatic lowering of PageRank may be evident in the months to follow. As the dominant search engine, Google drives traffic to websites, and the higher they place in search results, the better the chance a site will receive a visit.

If the PageRank drop knocks blogs out of places where they had been ranking well in search, we expect that traffic will fall as well, and we will hear about this again.

follow me on Twitter

Andrew Ooi has compiled a short list of Malaysian sites, many were as much as a PR5 previously, and currently show a PageRank of zero (a white bar)

Examples include:-

Colleen’s Simple Kind of Life and 5xmom

The numbers seem to be stable across multiple data centers

There doesn’t seen to be any change in prominent Search Marketing sites such as Search Engine Round Table and Search Engine Journal, and other popular bloggers such as Emom and Yaro still seem to have their degraded but still "head above water" rankings.

Meanwhile Matt Cutts is playing around with $200 PCs and the negative views of the blogosphere regarding Google.

Meaning Of PageRank Unchanged

Google have had more than a month to change the description of PageRank on their website.

I haven’t seen any change to Search Engine Rankings and there is still no way to request reconsideration without admitting guilt.

The Webmaster Help Center also doesn’t give an option to report that you think Google is making a mistake in their manual evaluation.

How do I request reconsideration of my site?

If your site has previously violated our webmaster guidelines, and you’ve made changes to it so that it now meets our guidelines, you can ask Google to reconsider your site for inclusion in the index.

In addition, if you recently purchased a domain that you think may have violated our guidelines before you owned it, you can use the reconsideration request form to let us know that you recently acquired the site and that it now adheres to the guidelines.

To request reconsideration of your site:

1. Sign in to Google webmaster tools. The webmaster tools Dashboard opens.
2. Under Tools, click Request reconsideration and follow the steps.

Google do now call this reconsideration, not just reinclusion, and Matt notes that you can still be in the index even though you have a penalty, which he updated November 4th 2007

I did find something cool though which I hadn’t seen before, maybe I missed it being reported, or didn’t pay much notice.

I am still being crawled frequently and there are some interesting spikes. It is a pity that the graph doesn’t line up with the scale.

From January people using PayPerPost will be able to use SocialSpark.

SocialSpark Alpha screenshots do still have PageRank listed, and that will likely be removed totally unless Google change their stance.

I still don’t sell PageRank, but traffic hasn’t changed, if anything it has increased as I write more content that people want to read and link to, and it even brings in some search traffic.

Google is making huge mistakes with these updates. I know many people receiving penalties sell links, and I am not trying to defend them.

When you get someone like regular reader Rob, a real expert in SEO, who based on the links he receives should be a comfortable PR4, or possibly a PR5, currently a PR0, because he wrote one paid review using nofollow on the links.

Then you get affiliate marketers like Vlad who may have written a couple of high quality reviews, and sold some advertising.
At the same time he also is an affiliate with some affiliate services which offer SEO friendly "clean links" for their merchants.
For a website owner they are still links from which they will be making money, though the money from affiliate marketing is variable – the links still affect search engines, as do many other affiliate links which feature 301 redirects.

Now whilst Aaron’s issues might be appeased as a result of the recent interchange with Matt, that is really just the tip of the iceberg. Aaron hasn’t been lynched.

To finish I am just going to steal the words of Michael VanDeMar which he posted as a comment on Matt’s Reporting On Paid Links post.

Honestly, Matt… and if your legal team won’t let you answer this, then I understand, but if you are allowed to answer then I (and I’m sure others) would really, really like to know… as the G algo stands now, exactly how much off balance would you say it is due to the insidious act of buying and selling text link ads? How many man hours have you spent combating this crime against humanity, and at what cost? And is it seriously skewing the results that much, that all the efforts spent on it were, and continue to be, justified? Is the algo that fragile?

The other main reason that I disagree with this idea is that you think (or appear to be implying, anyways) that Paid Link === No Human Review. This not the case 9 times out of 10. You should know that.

Update – Official Statement From Izea (PayPerPost)

An official statement finally from Izea (PayPerPost) on their blog regarding Google PageRank Updates.

We now know from some of our friends inside of Google (thanks "bob") that they are now looking for phrases such as PPP, PayPerPost,ReviewMe, Payu2blog, etc. in the text of your post. For that reason I would suggest refraining from using any type of this text in the body of your posts, sponsored or not. When you disclose thank the sponsor, not PPP.

I would like to thank Ted (CEO of Izea) for having the courage to say something about this in public, something it seems Google so far have not managed to do, and rarely do so on an official company blog.

Lisa Stewart of Bigfoot Web Marketing also has an excellent writeup of the decision process on the PayPerPost boards that ultimately led to Ted Murphy making a statement.

Comments

*Originally published at AndyBeard.eu

Tag:

As I wrote in my initial preview of SocialSpark, there will be new metrics for gauging the authority and influence of a blog, to help determine advertising spend, not only based upon traffic and demographics, but also on past performance with CPM and CPC data also being made available.

With SocialSpark, any required links will be nofollow, though there is an option for editorial links without a nofollow.

All the negotiation about a particular campaign will be 100% transparent, thus there will be an audit trail to prove that an advertiser didn’t require specific linking, and that audit trail will be open for public, or search engine approval.

There will be full disclosure within each post, with a link though to that 100% transparent audit trail, far exceeding any stipulations or recommendation from either the FTC or WOMMA.

Advertisers will no longer be able to require a positive tone, everything will be neutral, bloggers can write what they want, but that may affect click-through rates and return on investment.

Based upon this, everything seems at least on the surface to be everything a search engine would want to see and encourage.

This Isn’t Going To Work

At least not without some cooperation from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask.

Other than the 100% transparency, a lot of this has really been available using the PayPerPost Direct system introduced by Izea 6 months ago.

Whilst on the surface the form for PayPerPost Direct suggests that advertisers were able to make specific requests for the tone, and specify linking, PayPerPost direct also provided a negotiation interface.

In many ways you can look on the initial order process as being purely suggestions, and the real final negotiated terms were often vastly different to any initial enquiry.

That was certainly the case for every review I wrote, yet I still received a PageRank penalty

In some cases I even finished the negotiation process, but just didn’t have time for a full review, so declined or gave a quick link for free.

But I have still received a penalty to my Google Toolbar PageRank, either -1 or possibly -2

A totally open system, with absolute disclosure and a full audit trail is the ideal scenario for internet users, and the search engines really have to make a choice, embrace the openness, or everything IS GOING TO GO UNDERGROUND.

PageRank Is STILL In The Equation

You will notice on the following exclusive screenshots that PageRank is still being displayed on the new interface, and Ted tells me that a final decision as to whether Alexa and PageRank will remain is still to be made.

If it does remain, I would hope they are looked at as the least important statistic, those used to find new publishers who haven’t been using the SocialRank code on their site for long enough to generate reliable statistics.

Difficult Choices

Both search engines and bloggers have difficult choices to make in the coming months.

The PayPerPost MarketPlace represents 11,000+ Advertisers and 85,000+ Bloggers, and I am sure that is set to increase.

It is noticeable that only a fraction of even PayPerPost bloggers have actually received some kind of penalty, and those are typically ones who were prominent in the PayPerPost Direct marketplace.

The funny or sad thing is that there has been a lot of collateral damage. As an example take Rob’s situation. To my knowledge he has never written a review for PayPerPost, yet is listed in the marketplace, mainly just to check out the system.
As far as I can see, and I have been reading his blog since he had just 3 subscribers, he also doesn’t sell links, hell he doesn’t even link to his own niche sites from his blog.

Rob’s PageRank took a -2 penalty purely from association

Thousands Of Sites Remain Unpunished

There are plenty of sites that are selling PageRank pasing 125×125 advertising spots that have slipped under the radar, yet sites such as SERoundTable and Search Engine Journal have been quite obviously targeted.

I know sites where Matt Cutts is a frequent visitor, and has even read paid reviews which have not had a penalty to their Google Toolbar PageRank applied.
The reviews were not "under the radar" but written by an authority in the topic being discussed.

There are many very prominent sites who every week, or every month blatantly thank their sponsors in what amounts to a post just full of PageRank passing links with no other content.
At one time these pages contained at least an introductory paragraph for each one, but often you will just see 8 or 10 links with no other content.

Time For An Olive Branch

Isn’t it easier for search engines to encourage good practice that is accountable, than to punish sites indiscriminately or based on some level of personal bias.
Without doubt there is bias and double standards in penalties that so far have been applied, and this is not a purely automatic process.

To finish here are a couple more exclusive screenshots to wet your appetite, featuring some of the statistics available in the new interface, and what appears to be a search result.

Comments

*Originally published at AndyBeard.eu

What’s it all about?

You’ve worked for months building a startup on a boostrap budget and the launch is near. How will you get an initial influx of traffic to propel your product/service into viral bliss? Don’t pay off bloggers to promote your startup, beg! Getting started is quick and easy. Fill out the form below, sit back, and wait for Internet stardom. You’re almost there!

Here’s what the service promises…

• Completely free
• No chicken hats
• No conflicts of interest
• No annoying reality show
• No direct deployments to production
• No premature acquisition announcements

To the person behind, thanks for the laugh, but I would expect a lawyers letter pretty soon.

Comments

WOMMA took some time to blast PayPerPost after an article about one of their participating bloggers, Colleen Caldwell, made it to the Los Angeles Times. Her offense? Posting a disclosure policy generated by PayPerPost to disclose her acceptance of compensation for blogging about various topics.

Beard took a peek at the WOMMA statement, and at the LA Times article in question. He noted the participation of Jeff Jarvis and Jason Calacanis in the Times interview; their commentary subsequently made it into WOMMA’s piece.

There are some deeper issues in play, especially when it comes to disclosure. Beard found that Calacanis, and Jarvis to a lesser extent, have room to improve in that area. First, Jarvis:

Jeff is collecting email addresses every time you place a comment, so you would expect some kind of privacy statement, especially with the amount of tracking going on.

You would also expect some kind of physical mailing address, because in some ways his blog is performing WOMM for the various businesses in which he has involvement.

Beard’s issue is more with privacy at Jarvis’ BuzzMachine; Jarvis has a lengthy disclosure page, but it is not accessible from single blog posts.

Now for Calacanis’ site, where Beard finds much more to poke:

I can’t give you an example of Jason Calacanis’ disclosure policy, he hasn’t got one.

It is well known that he has financial connections with www.ThisNext.com which is present all over his website without disclosure.

Jason’s ThisNext connection is also important, because in many ways ThisNext is a competitor to PayPerPost, and online reviews sites are not immune to problems with shilling reviews.

When Jason attacks PayPerPost is it really just because of ethics and his concern?

Beard wraps up everything by going back to the WOMMA piece, and what he saw as a contradiction between their recent statement and point number 5 in their FAQ.

That section of the FAQ answers the question about why there aren’t specific rules about what people should say. But in their anti-PayPerPost commentary, they call for "strict guidelines" on disclosure.

It would be instructive if WOMMA could deconstruct the PayPerPost disclosure policy as Caldwell has posted on her site, and indicate what may be construed as deceptive, unfair, or unclear. Along with why WOMMA should be the ones qualified to do so.

Marketers take note – a little research can save the company some embarrassment when making a pitch. If the recipient is already hostile, trying to break through might work, but it could backfire. Valleywag has engaged in substantial PayPerPost mockery, with several posts consistently making the same point: Nick Denton and company don’t like the company’s business model:

The problem with PPP isn’t that it’s not effective, assuming it is effective versus other kinds of product promotion. The problem is that it’s sleazy manipulation, pure and simple. You either recognize that sleaze for what it is, or you don’t.

Now that Denton is back to handling Valleywag’s editorial duties after a break, he was probably delighted to see that Murphy had provided him a little grist for the morning posting mill. Murphy dropped a note in the Gizmodo mailbox, asking about their interest in working with Pay Per Post. Denton promptly reposted the email at Valleywag with accompanying commentary:

One would have thought that the attitude of blog publishers, including Gawker Media, publisher of this site, was clear: Pay Per Post, the blog marketing scam backed by Tim Draper, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist, is payola journalism. Disclosure does not absolve those publishers which take bribes from Pay Per Post clients such as Hewlett Packard.

Not everyone agrees that a paid review is tantamount to abducting homeless people and selling their organs on the black market. Andy Beard blogged about his experience in writing about Volusion for another pay-for-review service, ReviewMe:

There is not even a hint of the paid review affecting my opinion There is no question of bias towards the product I have provided what I feel is constructive criticism that will hopefully help improve the service for both new and future customers Asking a blogger for a real opinion about a product, and being willing to pay them some compensation for the time invested is a very worthwhile method of gaining feedback, and is not buying opinion.

Allen Stern at Center Networks thinks Murphy would benefit from a shift in business model:

Become an advertorial company. Do what TV, print and radio does… charge for a slot. So for example, you could buy a full page post on Gizmodo, CN, TC, BB, anywhere that will allow it (I am not saying these will/would). Then the advertiser provides the full content for that post, title, links, etc.

Does PayPerPost appeal to you as a blogger? Vote and let us know; voting will be open for one week.

—