"Blogomercials and Social Media Marketing"

Stop It Already!!! We are bombarded with some kinds of marketing ploy in every venue of our lives it has become a non-stop cacophony of "Buy This", "I Can Make Your This" , blaa blaa blaa bull shit.

 I expect it from TV it is for the most part transparent 15 minutes of programming then 3 minutes of ad man noise. Then we had Infomercials, these schlocky hour long advert loosely disguised as a "Talk Show" or "New Magazine Story" to sell us crap that usually does not work. So no wonder the marketers have discovered the easy street that is "The Blog".

  When blogging started they were for the most part personal logs from a real person about their lives, They were a window into our friends or people we wanted to be our friends. I liked that, I still for the most part only read personal blogs. So no surprise when the enterprising marketer discovered blogging. They could create digital adverts, or co-op people into a outlet for their digital adverts.

 I will continue to support personal blogs and commercial blogs which will place real reviews and critical articles on them. I really like a blog that is commercial like Vancitybuzz.com . He at least will be critical of stuff and it is not all rainbows and unicorns.

 If we are not careful, social media will be totally co-oped by marketers and the open speech information sharing that occurs will vanish as people loose trust in the medium.

 The blogs that I personally find to be nothing more than at best a arm of marketers and at worst a Blogfomercial. It is the Blogfomercials that really get to me, the use of a media which people associate with real people writing real opinions are nothing more than "Advertising" , Glossed up to or down to look like a personal review or subject of interest.

 How do they do this? Well bloggers love clicks, love attention and love free shit. Perfect for marketers, where giving a blogger a free dinner, trip, product in return for a positive experience blog post is cheaper and more effective target advertising than a TV spot, or a ad in the local fishwrapper weekly.

 I personally now because of the lack of un-compensated blogs only take product, dinner, event recommendations, from friends or community review sites like Yelp. It is a symbiotic parasitic relationship for the marketers and bloggers. The marketers get cheap promotion, the bloggers get free crap, but the consumer like me gets a non-review review. If you do not believe me, visit some of these blogs, do you ever, ever see a critical restaurant review? Or hear about a dirty room at a hotel? never!

 This atmosphere of blogomericals has also taken hold on twitter, especially since it has become the wild west of marketing. Anyone who has ever sold anything, is somewhat tech and social media savy is marketing their wares on twitter now, filling friends streams up with one pitch after another. Me personally would love to see a commercial and non commercial twitter stream.