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Evangelism, Transparency, and Integrity in the blogosphere

Posted: September 6th, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Marketing | 1 Comment »

I was just reading a post on Scoblizer where Robert is talking about the iPhone price drop and in the middle of the post I came across this statement:

This “reduce the pricing” trend is one of the reasons I LOVE this industry.

Seagate, today, just brought out new hard drives. More capacity. More features. Lower price.

Now I know Seagate sponsors the Scoble Show, so it was not really a surprise to me, but it seemed like a square peg getting jammed in a round hole to see that in a totally unrelated blog post. If there was a big badge on his blog saying “this blog is sponsored by Seagate” I think it would be much better, but there is no such disclosure, whereas you go to the Scoble Show and Seagate is all over it.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t think anyone is totally unbiased, and i’ve written about schwag before but I like to see it up front, rather than woven into unrelated blog posts.

The reason I bring this up is not to attack Robert, the Vallywag is there for that, I do it because i think he is a pretty important figure in the blogosphere and I think his conduct in the blogosphere often sets the bar. I mean he just co-authored the Social Media Bill of rights.

Thoughts?

  • http://www.frozentoothpaste.com david

    Very interesting. In general, I’m with you that there should to disclosure. There’s nothing explicitly wrong with mentioning a sponsor, but you should say something more like, “Seagate, on of our sponsors, recently lower prices.”