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Blogging For Paychecks
prostoalex writes "When you hear about blogging, you're most likely to hear about personal journals, self-expression and youngsters sharing their daily routines online. However, as Wall Street Journal notes, the word blogger can now frequently be seen in corporate job ads. Blogging jobs pay anywhere from $40,000 to $70,000 and frequently require writing copy for corporate Web sites and ability to promote on the Internet. A search for blogger and blogging on one of the job meta search engines yields several hundred open positions."
I see. So to corporate america, blogging equates to marketing.
Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
Raydude
For all the whining teenagers... your time has finally come. yes, people want to pay you to get all angsty.
A little thing to realize about want ads is that they are usually filled by the time you read them.
So what is the job seeker supposed to do? Well, according to What Color is Your Parachute, the key is to use your connections to get in.
If you are a blogger with a dedicated audience, you will already have people knocking on your door to get you to write for them. I know I do, and all I do is write a few words on this site here.
If you want to blog for a company, see if you know anyone working there. They have a better idea about the hiring situation inside their company than any want-ad could ever let you know.
I wonder how much he gets payed by Slashdot?
At most of the places I've worked, the grammar of a significant percentage of the employees bordered on illiteracy. At least these bloggers are likely to be able to write coherently.
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This is just a marketing extension really, businesses have long since been hiring people to go "put out the good word" for them. It happened for a long time on the Internet without many people noticing, with company rep's using a sock puppet attack to gain support for some company. I've seen them all over tons of forums (usually given away by talking about _any_ company and having less than 5-10 posts, and all those posts being total garbage), onto IRC for certain channels of people counter-pointing some viewpoint, and even in Slashvertising. Seriously folks, nothing to see here, move along.
Gullible hacks are all over this 'blogger' gibberish because somebody somewhere thinks it's a hot new word.
It isn't - it's silly and it rolls off your tongue wrong, like "Pog" - but that hasn't stopped anyone.
In fact, it's gotten so bad that I was reading Time magazine today and saw a totally serious sidebar on this hip new phenomenon, "Blogebrity". This is a nonsense Contagiousmedia hoax, and I'm surprised the editors let it slip through. (Or I wonder how much they got paid.) At any rate, Time's sloppy standards there exemplify the cultural phenomenon where anything that says 'blog' and sounds trendy is brilliant and worth supporting.
Yikes.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
Frequently updated and interesting content like /. can develop a community around it. From there, whether the site chooses to simply offer a service for the goodwill of their readers, or incorporate a more conventional way of monetizing website traffic, provides the business payoff.
Smart business IMO, and we'll probably see more of it.
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As long as they state on the blog who they are paid by, I'm fine with it. It is where they don't tell you that they get paid to do it that I get concerned about where blogging is taking itself.
Reading this article makes me think we are setting ourselves up for a whole 'nother dot com boom/bust.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
If they disclose that they're being paid by $COMPANY$ to blog, fine. If they don't, that's unethical.Just like advertorial in newspapers or on TV, actually.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
bloggers, webmasters, when are we trolls going to get some respect!
This is my sig.
%s/blogger/astroturfer/g
While companies may think they are using blogging as a marketing tool, I think that the reality is somewhat more complicated. Corporate sponsored blogs tend to end up being a focal point for interaction related to specialized (corporate related) topics. And specialization is the crucial attribute that make blogs so interesting.
For the first time in the history of the world, we now have a direct channel for hyper-specialization. Blogs + RSS amount to a revolution; The high availability personal-press.
Each of us tend to seek out and interact on subject matters that we are interested in, believe in and/or know something about. In the past, that generally meant your choice of friends and organizations that you belonged to. But today, we can gather around micro-press engines that allow us to interact (as I am doing now).
The end result is that like-minded people from all over the world end up exchanging ideas and critical thought with one another over subject matter that is important to them rather than what a media outlet wants to be important to them.
This new explosion of specialization will have profound and unforseen results as it evolves, such as a completely new and transcendent awareness in society. The populations that make use of blogs are literally transforming themselves from network/newspaper zombies into their own people with their own refined views that match their own personalities. In a very real sense, the blog is an attractor that is pulling us towards a new form of collective awareness or sentience.
So in summary, I think it is a good thing.
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
Wake up: the emperor has no clothes. Blogging has been owned by vested interests for a while.
Look at all the technology companies who encourage their employees to blog and wax effusive about their products. (picking a couple of easy examples) Sun, Microsoft, Redhat and many more do this.
Witness the co-opting of political blogs of all kinds during the last season of US and Australian elections. Notice the tight coupling between the language used by certain bloggers and spin crafted by political parties?
Observe the abuse of blogs to gain or destroy Google ratings.
If you think that what you are reading in a blog is somehow automatically more "real" than something you would read in an advert, press release or partisan hack's column, then you are deluding yourself. Blogs are another tool in the bag of PR and marketing people and they will continue to be used as such.
I can remember when blogging was cool.
Now it's just another fashion to coopt for marketting reasons. These people will make lots of money for a months until everyone realizes that anyone can write blogs -- that's the entire point. Then it'll be just another job requirement for employees.
Wait, that's not true. Blogs were never cool.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
If you still think blogging is about teenagers keeping their journals, you're so 2003.
Blogging has entered business in a big way, and people getting paid to blog is a natural progression. A good blogger must be able to crank out topical posts every day, often more than one entry a day. It ain't easy. I try to keep up my graphic blog (at: http://sunandfun.blogspot.com/) regularly and the best I can do is about one post every two days.
The lady in the Wall Street Journal article blogs for a yogurt company. I'm sure blogging is a more effective way of pulling in business than, say, sending out sample dispensers in supermarkets, which is kind of messy, plus the company has to provide all the samples that always get eaten by people who never buy. Of course, her blog will be even more popular now that she's got a write-up in Wall Street Journal.
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Some random thoughts... no disrespect meant to anyone..
... bloggers, for unsophisticated marketers, are shills. Corporations should look at other ways of creating buzz if they cannot find a handful of users / customers who cannot say something good about them.
.. not what you want them to read.
... I doubt a blogger will.
Most corporations have been hiring shills for centuries. Shilling has been done online for years
The best bloggers are loyal employees. Use them to show that the company has a soul and a heart. No need to hire outsiders... look within.
I've tried to hire some tech bloggers to help me develop content on a website or two... specially given that my skills are in putting together sites and not blogging or reporting or even writing coherent articles.
To me commerical blogging (from a non corporate but money making perspective) is essentially fairly similar to running or working for a newspaper. It has to be a very controlled equation that manages egos, commercial reality, discipline, ethics and discipline.
Egos: The most dedicated bloggers I've met (and I've met a fair few in person) walk around with their egos in their pants.. (and moan about not making enough money to pay their hosting bills). Sometimes it is this wonderful mix of poverty and passion that produces great blogs... usually it is passion.
Commercial Realities: At some point, people stop caring about the bloggers mundane life and start caring more about the news and information in the blog. In a corporate environment, no one cares about how much salt you put on your fish and chips... deal with it and develop a focus on what the readers want
Discipline: Can you produce a story or two a day that will keep readers coming back? Most blogs are abandoned, usually because the bloggers loose interest... If you can discipline yourself and produce a good story every day (hard to do in most areas) or week, you will see people return.. this will equate to $$s
Commerical Realities: At some point we all need to accept that anything commercial needs a disiplined approach. Commercial entities do not understand that the best journalists often don't file a story a day... they are good because of the quality and not the quantity. If their PR department cannot find something new about the company every day
They have corporate prostitutes. . .
Personal Satisfaction Engineers find that term offensive, you insensitive clod.
KFG
Now, if only they would add "jerking off" and "reading slashdot instead of actually working" to the job descriptions, imagine the flood of applications?
:)
Sorry, I just could not resist
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That may be the case with most blogs, but Microsoft doesn't just promote their crap, on slashdot they actually mod people down who dare to talk down about their doomed future and their crappy proprietary software.
:)
Even on anti Microsoft posts where I got +5 moderation, that was usually after 10 mod downs and 15 mod up's. Yeah, you really gotta be that good at making your point to nail them.
Perhaps, shashdot should have a special rating for anti Microsoft posts that make them more difficult to mod down, and they should completely block access from known Microsoft ip addresses.
I know "shill" is an inflammatory word to some, but that's what I equate with blogging for money. It is a natural consequence of tying salary to writing.
I think you might find that the purpose of corporate bloggers, is it's another avenue of propergander for the corporation to use to get it's message out there. Only by using blogs, it will probably be camophlaged in a way to make it look like it's a persons opinion or facts from an unbiased source, rather than part of the Corporate Internet Advertising machine.
... depends how much the craze hits. I think it probably won't be too bad, but I can certainly see an eventual decline in the nummber of Blogger jobs required. A lot will depend on the success of it.
:-)
As such, a good blog with a good disguise might pull in big bucks for the Corp (by selling their products), provided they get enough people reading them. After all, some blogs have thousands of individuals visit them each week. (Some of my friends have hundreds each day, and they are all different IP addresses, so it is most likely they are individual people.)
Will it go bust
Just my two cents worth.
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)