Saturday, October 9, 2010
Using blogs as business
Today, everyone can create a blog on the internet. It could be for a class, work or for fun, but the problem is that anyone can write their own opinion and start to affect the other people that read the blogs around the world. I have seen how today companies are using blogs to create more business. They talk about their products, their expected future and advertize anything about them. These have positive and negative effects, the positive is that people can read and learn and comment about their products and weather decide to buy them or not. The problem is when the companies start to abuse the blogs. I heard how some companies are creating fake people in order to gain more costumers. Monsanto a company that produces agricultural products worldwide is one. Monsanto was trying to promote genetically engineered/ Genetically Modified food as a way to solve world hunger. They know that food shortage around the world is a bigger political problem, but since their product was modified food, they created a blog, with fake people (groups) supporting genetically modified food. When a real person enters their blog and sees how all the “people” are commenting good things about the products they will but their product. I think that today media has made the line between what is good and what is bad very thin.
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I've actually heard of companies doing this. Some companies actually use this as a way to get honest feedback out of their employees. In the way you depict their usage it is creating a false sense on their part. Most times you can honestly tell how fake sounding the posts that come from the company or these fake people. All in all, it comes down to who actually believe what they see and those who take the time to figure out if it is entirely true or not.
ReplyDeleteYou are very right, this now even happens in shopping websites. I have noticed that there are fake comments about the quality of the product. Even in news that politically driven, there are fake comments showing the support for that party. When people see that there are so many supporters, they get influenced to do so too. I even did the same thing for my brothers blog. He was writing a blog for WSJ and needed 15 comments per week for him to keep his job. I probably wrote 2-3 per week for him.
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