ChasNote

A VC author Fred Wilson, whose site is a member of FM’s network, recently took Sonos onto his site as a sponsor, and then — gasp! — he told his readers all about the deal (Fred’s post). The sponsorship includes 120×600 ad banners as well as a “sponsored by” wrapper around Fred’s “In Heavy Rotation” music list. Full disclosure: As FM’s sales guy, I’ll get paid commission on the deal.

Pamela Parker, in a story for ClickZ, honed in on the fact that Fred asked Sonos to send him their product to try out, and he promised his readers he’d blog his thoughts after he does. “But what if he finds it crappy?” Parker rightly asks. Since Fred himself accepts (or declines) any prospective ad campaigns before they run on his site, and since his site is so closely aligned with the brand of Fred Wilson, I’m guessing he’d be honest, if polite, and not accept future business from Sonos.

A point that ClickZ did not pick up is that Fred gives away his ad-sales revenue. From Fred’s post: “Most of my readers know that I donate all the revenue that this blog generates to non-profit organizations and the money that Sonos pays for this sponsorship will go to FM, who will take their cut, and the balance will go to good causes. I am not doing this for the money.” That policy, it would seem, puts Fred in a fairly unimpeachable position with respect to talking openly about advertisers on his site.

But the broader question is still open: Can journalists talk openly about advertisers on their sites without breaching the trust of their readers?

My post congratulating Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin on her transparent review of an advertiser’s service (ChasNote 12/14/05) received some spirited feedback. (Thanks for writing, my spirited friends!) It seems to me, though, the answer is yes. If a cable network loses credibility with a viewer, that viewer has hundreds of other choices one thumb-click away; if a website does the same, that site’s readers have millions of alternatives, listed one after another on Google results pages. Technorati indexes more than 30,000,000 weblog sites alone. If a site stops delivering on the promise that attracted readers in the first place, it couldn’t be easier for those readers to abandon the site. And as reader-authors (them bloggers) and other online publications find less credible content at that site to which to link, the Googlejuice dries up, and it becomes harder for new readers to stumble upon that site. Among those 30,000,000 blogs there are undoubtedly a bunch of bad apples and squirrelly journalists. But all 30,000,000 of them are up against a self-policing system that may, in fact, have more teeth than old-school editorial committees.

Reading FT’s interview with Bill Gates (I read it at Searchblog), the topic is China. But when Gates says,

“The internet overwhelmingly makes information available. It is not possible to block information, it is just not. You can make it so that the average person who just clicks on popular websites, with no extra effort, certain things don’t show up there. But in terms of actually blocking information…”

which is great advice for corporate bloggers. What’s the point in spinning & hyping when a dozen credible alternative sources of information are listed on the same search results page?

Today’s MediaPost talks about the benefits reaped by corporations who let their staff bloggers speak (at least some portion of) their mind:

“Pete Blackshaw chief marketing officer at buzz-monitoring firm Intelliseek, said that [Microsoft blogger Robert] Scoble likely has the authority to be quite controversial, given how helpful he’s been to the company’s PR efforts. ‘Robert Scoble is a one-man counterpoint to the argument that Microsoft is a close-minded, evil company,’ he said. ‘Even if you believe he crossed the line on this, he’s still such a net positive for Microsoft.’”

Well said.

New York Magazine (Blogs to Riches) explores why the top blogs tend to remain the top blogs — the “power-law distribution” phenomenon brought to the web. “Internet studies have found that inbound links are an 80 percent-accurate predictor of traffic. The more links point to you, the more readers you have.” Or, at least, the more links that point to you, the more publishers and bloggers trust what you have to say (see ChasNote 8/3/05).

But take your eye off the ball (or stop publishing new content for a few days) and those inbound links start to dry up, say three Top 100 bloggers, Arianna Huffington (Huffington Post), Peter Rojas (Engadget) and FM’s own John Battelle (Searchblog).

Other noteworthy excerpts:

“Gawker even claims to turn away advertisers that are too low-rent; the site’s ad manager boasted to Mediaweek that it takes no Ford or Chevy ads because ‘we hate American cars’ and no pharmaceutical ads because ‘our readers are healthy and beautiful.’”

“As [NYU instructor Clay] Shirky puts it, ‘The Boing Boing thing is, they have more readers than Wired and yet they have a part-time staff of five. That’s the new math.’”

For the record: GM has been running ads lately on Boing Boing (an FM partner site), and we’d be happy to take ads from Ford or Chevy!

Check out the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki to see which big companies are active bloggers. Coming soon: Stock-price tracking to see if there’s a correlation between an openness to frank, accessible dialog about your brand and the financial performance of your company.