Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
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.
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
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
Well, it's quite obvious that communication is a fundamental activity that underpins all human activity. When you change the way people communicate, you change society in profound ways.
The Gutenberg's printing press broke the Catholic Church, made modern science possible, and gave rise to modern Democracy. There's no question the Internet will have very profound long-term infulence over future structure of society. We're only 10 years into it.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.