The afternoon’s program proved to be very pratical and eminently enjoyable. The afternoon included:
- Blog Promotion: Posting isn’t Enough – a solid overview that emphasized how bloogers need to proactively involve themselves in the “blogosphere” if they expect to see any real results from creating and maintaining a blog. This philosophy applies to both personal and business blogs. Also, there was an excellent discussion on the role of bloggers as sources of endorsement for products and services. As you might suspect, there are numerous opinions about the ethics of endorsing something for a fee versus marketing a product or service in the guise of a blogger.
- Blog Success: The Experts Speak – one of the highlights of the entire day, the panel-style discussion by the attending gurus covered a range of topics from basic blogging issues and technical considerations to building a blog culture in your business and your life.
- Blogs and Beyond: What’s Coming Next – This last session was an information-rich presentation by Anil Dash on the uses and future of blogs and the technology that drives them. Mr. Dash’s comments definitely sparked my imagination when thinking of how to apply blogs in my professional work. If you want to see what the presentation covered in more detail, check out the slides.
I think there is a fine line between being paid to comment versus wholesale marketing that is underwritten by a company. The idea of blogging for a fee seems fine to me as long as it is clear who is sponsoring the writer. Eventually, blogging has to have some sort of profit motive and if a blogger wants to work as a “virtual copywriter” that sounds like a reasonable way to generate some income.
The ideal situation might be where a company pays a blogger to write some informed opinions about a product or service and avoids trying to control the exact content of the blog posts.