High Road Communications

Few relationships are under such scrutiny as those between bloggers and PR folks.

We’ve seen lots of posts + stories about potential conflicts of interest when PR people approach bloggers with free product for review or pay for bloggers to attend company events. The anti-corp-marketing people raise cautionary flags that companies are bribing bloggers into writing something they wouldn’t have otherwise written. PR teams will quickly shoot back, “we are getting in front of bloggers who naturally have an interest in said product/story and we are simply asking for their honest opinion, nothing more, nothing less.”

This is all very similar to how deal we with traditional media. The twist comes when you consider the impact of programs like this which pay bloggers “bonus” money for number of times their stories are read. This type of program is becoming more common and I include the Gawker example because it is such a complete description of the business model.

A popular PR tool is the “negotiated exclusive” which attempts to barter more favorable placement of stories in exchange for giving the reporter the story first. The blogging for dollars bonus money programs ratchet the concept up even further by bringing PR people + bloggers together with a mutual goal: more eyeballs reading the content. An exclusive on a hot new product or breaking news story has always been able to bring the writer fame but in the Web 2.0 world it brings dollars. PR people who get this model working for them also stand to win.

What do you think ?