Comments on: When Does a Marketing Agency Become a Media Company?

By: Justin Kistner

Justin Kistner — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 19:51:01 +0000

This post was right on target for me. A client recently hired me for an online marketing project. They had a list of links they wanted to have a presence on. It turns out the majority required content. Most of them were sites like Digg, so they didn’t just need content, they needed compelling content. So what began with a request for link building to attract traffic, turned into a content production workflow.

By: Tac

Tac — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 13:46:57 +0000

I agree that authenticity is important to staying credible with your audience and that manipulating that would ruin the trust that you have built up.

I think the best reason for a company, like HP, to blog is in order to build trust with its customers. I don’t think that corporate blogs could ever be as influential as individual blogs. People expect to hear the “company” perspective from an HP blog, therefore it’s just not as influential.

By: Mike Manuel

Mike Manuel — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 16:40:12 +0000

It’s a good point, Tac, I can’t say there’s no potential for abuse when a bunch of us have blogs like this, but whatever reach and influence we collectively wield would surely be destroyed if we started manipulating and abusing people’s trust.

The real interesting thing to think about here isn’t actually individual bloggers, but company blogs. When you’re a Google or a Microsoft or, uh, an HP, and you have multiple corporate blogs, the potential to use these platforms in an orchestrated way – to help drive awareness, pimp a message, etc. – is very powerful, very real. But unethical?