Jeremiah Owayang, Sr Analyst at Forrester Research has documented (real time) the release of a K-mart paid for blog posting. Jeremiah talked to the blogger who posted it (he got $500) and the company that offers the service called Izea. I bookmarked the twitter posts following Jeremiah. Reading the microblog, it is interesting to watch the story come together. Jeremiah talks to the blogger, talks to Izea, and responds to his his followers on twitter. Jeremiah then follows up with it on his blog check it here:
Understanding Izea’s Sponsored Blogging Service
MediaPost Publications also covered the story here:
Kmart Enlists Bloggers To Get The Good Word Out
If companies are going to get popular bloggers to pay attention to thier products, more power to them! Who doesn’t like free stuff, especially if the product is high quality. The only person who gets hurt in this scenario is the blogger. If I read someones blog and they started doing product placements, I would tend to gloss over them. The only person who has been able to pull this off is Oprah, but her brand is so strong that people look to see what she has to say about products. We should really call this trend the Oprah phenomenon (patent pending!)
What do you think?
