Undeclared paying of bloggers is not word of mouth

“Public relations firms are beginning to get in on the digital marketing act, seeing the business of inspiring bloggers to write about their brands as natural, if somewhat different, extension of traditional PR skills.”

The Media Guardian published another special insert on Internet Advertising yesterday and the above quote comes from an article (not yet online) about how PR is finding the ‘blogosphere’ the ‘perfect environment’.

Technorati recently published figures in their annual state of blogosphere survey claiming that this inspiring of bloggers is not too subtle -

“…one in three bloggers has been approached to be a brand advocate. Of those, more than six in ten were offered payments of some kind.”

These propositions are likely to be attractive to bloggers. Anybody that has done the maths would know its very difficult (it requires hundreds of thousands of pageviews) to make money from blogging via advertising with effective cost per thousands (eCPMs) of $2 to $10.

And there are companies now offering brands paid for ‘word of mouth’ opportunities with services like PayPerPost.

And this is not only about word of mouth. PayPerPost essentially pay bloggers to write about and importantly link to websites or products. The amount they also pay depends on a blog’s Google PageRank and traffic. In case you don’t know, blogs tend to have great PageRank.

Now, as any good journalist will instinctively know, any blogger that writes about a product for dosh and who does not declare this - if caught out - would ruin their blogs reputation as a credible source of information and probably damage the brand of the product they are reviewing at the same time.

PayPerPost publishes a code of bloggers ethics that includes a commitment to disclosure. But they do demand to read and approve a post before they pay.

Since paid for blog posts are not that different from advertorials (and is therefore not real word of mouth) the real value of using this method of promotion must lie in the transfer of PageRank from the blog to the product page more than anything else.