Worker Bees Blog

Some months ago, a little company named Marqui announced a plan to pay bloggers $800 a month to write about their product...no control over what they wrote, but they had to write something. Much drama ensued. Most of it as people derided the concept and said the sky was falling upon that pure, chaste land known as the blogsphere. [Disclaimer: as it turns out, I know the Marqui CEO, although I started writing about the topic long before I found that out.]

I, myself, posted that I too thought it wasn't a great idea, but for business reasons. Marqui was paying influential bloggers...paying, essentially, for their ability to influence. BUt being perceived as shills would necessarily degrade that influence. So Marqui would never get exactly what they thought they were paying for.

Now Steve Rubel (who to his credit was never one of the screaming hordes calling for Marqui's burning at the stake...or more accurately for the burning at the stake of the bloggers who would dare to participate in Marqui's program) has written an article advising companies on how they can leverage influential bloggers.

Some of the ideas are absolutely in line with what I offer,especially hiring a blogger to write for a company, with it fully disclosed that it's the company's blog, and some of them don't seem so different from the Marqui idea, like trying to get bloggers to use your product and blog about it.

I'm just waiting to see if similar drama ensues, or if Steve is such an all-around mensch that no one will feel compelled to tear a new one over the article.