Slashdot Mirror
Blogs, Games and Advertising
bippy writes "Video game companies have found a way around the natural distrust we all have of advertising and it's called the blog, RedAssedBaboon reports. The article points to a recent story by the Chicago Tribune about blogs as ads, and then talks about the Beta-7 and ILoveBees campaigns. RAB argues that gaming companies are starting to understand the potential of blogs, giving them their full support but also using them to get at the gamer. It raises some interesting questions about ethics, game journalism and advertising."
I've seen a number of "stories" here on Slashdot that look a lot like ads.
Companies get good publicity through blogs because we tend to trust them... Well, there have been quite a few Slashdot "stories" lately from posters with something to gain - such as the editor from Wired magazine.
It's not necessarily the fault of Slashdot or its editors, but one of those classic guerilla marketing tools is to create publicity (good or bad) around your product, service, etc. It works because it's not always recognizable as marketing, but it ends up being effective as such.
Yes, ethics has nothing to do with journalism or advertising.
This is not a big deal and will ultimately not succeed much, although I won't say it will totally fail.
Blogs are "pull". You have to choose to read them, and thanks to the wonders of RSS and newsreaders, the majority of most blog's readerships are recurring, from the smallest ones to the largest ones. That is to say, blog readers rapidly get to know the blog, where it is coming from, etc., and make decisions based on that.
If you try to start an astroturfing blog, you'd better have something more substantial than "rah rah rah, product X is great", or people won't subscribe or visit for long. Blogs as pure astroturfing degenerate into astroturfing web pages, and they just don't work.
If you have something more substantial, then you may acquire an audience, but it'll be mostly for the substantial stuff, not the rah rah rah. In fact I know of many blogs that are largely product advocacy blogs, or can be interpreted as such, but are still fascinating because of the beef they have. An example I've been working through lately: The Old New Thing, written by Raymond Chen, an important Windows developer and guru. On the one hand, you could read it as Windows advocacy (though I truly believe it is not intended as such directly), but there is so, so, so much meat there that it is irrelevant. My blog hasn't got a huge readership, but I know the ones I have are there for the substance, because I don't offer much else.
Like I said, astroturfing may not "fail", but it'll be just preaching to the choir, which isn't terribly effective. (The majority of political blogs already boil down to this, although they aren't necessarily intended to be astroturfing.) Nothing to worry about here, just corporate hipsters who aren't.