The next time someone recommends or speaks highly of CareerBuilder, they may be getting paid to do so.
According to a story in OMMA, a company called Experience “uses non-professional recruits, including moms, to spread the word about particular brands and products via blogs, e-mails, product placements, casual discussions, posters, fliers and sampling.”
The company counts CareerBuilder as one of its clients.
Knowing that journalists sometimes get it wrong (let alone bloggers), I contacted Experience to confirm that this was indeed the case, asking:
“Are people paid/rewarded by your company to spread positive buzz (’brand ambassadors,’ as Jennifer Floren labels them) about CareerBuilder, like the story suggests, or is something different going on?”
This is what I got from Janet Sun, VP of marketing:
“Experience is a careers web site for college students and grads. We also work with recruiters and advertisers that want to reach this audience – job postings, resume search, targeted emails, in site display advertising etc.
“We also have a Brand Ambassador service where we recruit and manage students and grads on behalf of companies. We compensate brand ambassadors for their work, and the project depends on the client’s objectives. It could involve postering a campus, assembling a street team for an event, handing out freebies etc. In all cases, we ask our brand ambassadors to be upfront that they are doing work for the client.”
I just love canned responses from marketing departments that don’t even answer the question you were asking in the first place. From her response, it certainly looks like CareerBuilder is paying for people to spread positive buzz about their site.
Wouldn’t it be better to actually take that money and create a site that truly is remarkable, instead of relying on manufactured buzz? And is it worth risking consumer trust in doing so?
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March 21st, 2006 at 12:08 pm
Joel, I’ve met Jennifer and Janet at their company HQ in Boston, and while they’re trying hard, they’ve always been a distant #2 to the pioneer in local college job boards, CollegeTrak (now MonsterTrak since purchase by Monster.com) so they need to make money wherever they can.
Product sampling, postering, flyering, music tours, etc., have long been tactics in college campus marketing, so it makes sense in the Internet age that this would extend to promotional blogging, and that a company like Experience.com, with such strong campus connections, would utilize such tactics to try to make a buck (and I don’t see anything slimy about it).
It’s because those methods have been successful for decades (I used to work for a college marketing events company) that they are getting their chance to thrive or fail in a recruiting context. We all know paid blogging is a fact of life now, and will probably increase before it trends down (when companies realize your conclusion is mostly on the mark).
March 22nd, 2006 at 10:24 am
Let’s not fool ourselves – there are a lot of companies paying marketers to manufacture positive buzz for their companies.
I can’t blame them – - companies selling blogs, word-of-mouth marketing, and peer-to-peer marketing must sound like the Holy Grail of Advertising considering how much its referenced as a more authentic way to connect with customers.
The problem of backlash is small – sniffing out fake posts and comments takes time and savvy – and the “vast majority’ of internet users will probably never know if someone is paid to spread the word.
I happen to disagree with the strategy for a different reason. It’s already not effective. Anonymous people telling me a product is great (or terrible) mean nothing to me. I already think anyone that pops into a product review or blog discussion is a plant unless they prove otherwise.
Blogging is about feedback for the blogger. Anonymous comments rarely mean anything, because most are deleted for spam or ignored as someone paid by marketing companies to spread the word.
The most egregious offenders are the ones who pretend to be a 16 year old who can’t spell. I see those comments all the time and know they are fake.
It’s the same for Amazon, E-Bay, and any other peer review system. You have to build trust before you can be taken seriously.
In fact, it was this rash of bad blog blog marketing that led me to quit my job and start a new company focused on online communities instead of writing blog posts.
Careerbuilder probably won’t suffer too much if this is spread far and wide – but they are missing the opportunity to create a real community of CareerBuilder Evangelists instead of paying someone else to fake it.