Blogs, Marketing and New Integrity Rules

The other day I was emailing back and forth trying to explain to a very internet marketing savvy but I think non-blogging friend that the marketing environment of the blogosphere is not the same as for the rest of the online world and that there was for a lot of bloggers a premium placed on relationship ahead of profits. Not that I do not want my blogs to be profitable - far from it. I enjoy blogging and the sociability of blogging, and I also and very definitely blog for business and therefore for profit.

I don’t think I did a very good job of explaining what I saw as the blogging marketing environment. It would have been good if I had picked up on Thomas Pierce’s blog on the subject - Cracking Credibility and Why Internet Marketing WILL Change. In this blog post, not a short one but a good one, among many elegantly phrased observations, Thomas opines, and I agree wholeheartedly, that ‘blogs are forcing marketing messages to perform at a higher level of integrity’. The whole article is well worth the read.

As Thomas posted this on January 6 and as I’ve only just noticed it - a bit late in terms of the discussion with my friend - I’ve realised that I need to re-vamp my newsfeed arrangements so that I pick up in a more timely fashion what interests me. After all, I did do last year a whole session on newsfeeds, RSS etc with my blogging mentor Andy Wibbels, author of the amazingly simple and clear blogging course, Easy Bake Weblogs.