Let’s say you’re pregnant or a Dad-to-be and one day, there’s a knock at your door. You open the door to discover a person standing there with a truckload of baby food.

The representative of the company says, “Pardon me, but I’d love to give you this entire truck of baby food for free. What you can’t store here, we’ll keep shipping to you free of charge as long as you want. No strings attached. Well, except for one. Would you mind terribly if you blogged about your experience with our product constantly? As long as you keep up the blog, we’ll keep the baby food coming. Maybe we’ll even throw in a stroller, diapers and a trip to Cancun!”

I’m quite sure every subsequent blog post you have about that company will be positive. Oh, they’ll say they never inherently asked you to blog positively about them.

But come on. We all know better.

The scenario of a company trading perks for inevitably positive blog posts primarily about that company does not make the blog…a blog.

It’s an ad. It’s so much of an ad that the advertising agency for that company should probably give you a cut of their retainer. Why? Because, subconsciously or not, your opinion about that company has been influenced prior to posting in a consistently biased way by them paying you to blog about them.

Blogs are genuine expression. At their best, they bring people together who share conversations. And as a product of human beings, blogs aren’t always sunshine and happiness. They raise questions. They voice concerns. They take distinct angles on a topic. They house positivity but they also house rants and complaints.

So does this mean getting paid to blog is wrong? No.

•    People getting paid to blog is not wrong.
•    People getting paid to blog about a range of issues relevant to a company’s target audience is not wrong.
•    Companies sponsoring and advertising on a blog site is not wrong.

People getting paid to blog only about a company’s offering in a positive light IS wrong. Not to mention it’s boring.

You have to have respect for your audience viewing your posts. If they’ve taken the time to visit, their expectations are that what they read will be the real, unbiased deal in terms of honest opinions, product reviews, etc. It is this total transparency that sets the table for a genuine community give-and-take. But when it’s clear that there’s someone else behind the curtain having a major influence on what bloggers can and can’t say, you’ve lost trust and integrity. Big time.

What’s the answer? It’s actually very easy.
If you’re a company and want to hire a group of people to blog in a social media community you host, that’s great. Sponsor and advertise your brand on the site. Give the bloggers a range of topics that relate to your brand’s target audience values hearing about. In this sense, it’s OK to set editorial guidelines and be firm about them so that the blog site’s content can maintain a certain focus and identity overall. For example, if you’re a baby food company, convey that bloggers can post about everything from diaper changing to teething to how to get more than 3 hours of sleep per night with a newborn.

But stipulate that the bloggers can never blog one way or another directly about your company.

Don’t be skeptical about this just yet – I’m getting to the reason why this is actually a great benefit to your brand.

Remove the question of bias altogether. Let the bloggers put their own stamp, their own personality, their own voice on the site. If you’ve given them the wide parameters based on audience profile (and they’re actually good writers), what they can craft is an entertaining, engaging area that people in your audience will find interesting enough to come back to time and time again.

There’s a great and wonderful irony here. By removing your company from the content and limiting its participation to being a sponsor or advertiser, the content of the blog – the most important and vital element to its success – can be more interesting of a read for people. In turn, a successful blog full of people you choose to target sees your brand in connection with the blogger…without being an influence on the blogger’s content. Ever.

Result: Your company gets its coveted visibility. The blogger keeps his or her integrity. The community of visitors benefits from new, captivating content.

Everybody wins. That’s not such a bad thing, is it?

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