BloggingSystems

Jason Calacanis, CEO of Weblogs, Inc (WIN), is speaking on the subject of maintaining authenticity and integrity within commercial social media. This is important for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that using blogs as a marketing tool can mean we pay less attention to those qualities. (i.e., marketingese doesn’t work in the blogosphere)

Since I’m posting as Jason is presenting, I’ll let you click through to the rest of the post.

Points Jason is making:

• Thanks to scandals and misinformation, there is a mistrust and angst about mainstream media.
• Blogging began to be a profitable medium. Case in point, Rafat Ali of Paid Content.
• Silicon Alley Reporter tanked during the dotcom bust, so Jason began looking to build a blog network, which became Weblogs Inc. in the fall of 2003. (His tech guy, Brian Alvey, came up with the name.
• The company entered a blogging war with Nick Denton’s Gawker, vying for supremacy as the #1 blog network.
• Jason “stole” Peter Rojas away from Gawker. Peter was blogging with Gawker at a blog called Gizmodo. If you follow gadget blogging, you’ve probably heard of a little blog called Engadget.
• Advertisers weren’t sure about blogs, didn’t trust them, but gradually advertisers came on board.

Jason is giving us a nice anecdotal history of Weblogs Inc, but I am hoping to hear him discuss some principles about the topic at hand, authenticity and integrity in commercial social media. He hasn’t so far.

OK, now he’s beginning to catch my attention talking about the quality of bloggers…

• “don’t worry about what everyone else is doing, look inside. How well you do is up to you!” (Look up the word “hustle” in the dictionary and you’ll find Jason’s name.)
• “Blog more…blog better.”
• Write one blog post per week and leave 100 intelligent comments on other people’s blog.

Jason is ranting about pay-per-post, where people get paid to write positive posts for products, etc. He’s not a fan of that by any means. WIN doesn’t allow any selling inside of editorial content. Advertising is kept separate.

Jason is now taking questions from the audience. He’s just been asked the question of why he sold the company. “Personal decision…it was a power buy…price was very attractive…it was right for the time.” (FYI…WIN was bought last year by AOL for about $25 million.)

Next question from audience: If you are transparent about being paid to post, is that evil? His response was that transparency is the issue, and that the blogger should declare they are being paid to post within the bounds of the post itself.

Bottom line: If you want to make a media business out of your blog efforts, DO NOT do pay-per-post. Editorial content must have integrity. Do not let anyone get inside the blog post. The blog post is sacred!

Technorati tag: BBS06