Andy nicely describes the biggest threat to blogging. As corporations and bloggers seek to ‘monetise’ blogging, they not only miss the point, they actually threaten to kill the very environment they are trying to leverage.

Well at least this takes something that has been happening over the last year into the open. Web Services company Marqui seems to have been one of the first to make a commercial move when last year it offer 20 Bloggers $2400 each to post some thing positive about Marqui once a week for three months. This was followed by Payperpost.com a fully commercial service, and then there is the more interesting case of haveyoursay.com which was LandRover taking over the Blog site of a disgruntled customer and using it to try to improve its customer services interaction.

Trust the personal experience; recognise the corporate ‘adverblog’

The good news is that they won’t succeed. The power and trust implicit in personal opinion is as old as man. Blogging happens to be a tool that articulates that trust. And that’s all that blogs are … tools for people to post, interact and discuss. So it all comes down to credibility, and its just as easy to disregard bad blogs as it is to sign up for good ones.

Relevance to Bankwatch:

The early starters in Bank blogging are right to start slowly. If their efforts were seen to be totally self serving they will be ignored. Of course there is always a self interest in blogs, but the emphasis is on “self”, not corporate. Blogs can’t be corporate.

tags: corporate+blogs, blogging, pinkomarketing, banks+social+networks