Kirjoitin jokin aika sitten CreamAID'ista, joka pyrkii tarjoamaan yrityksille mahdollisuuden blogikeskusteluiden hallinnoimiseen ja bloggaajille mahdollisuuden saada kirjoituksistaan rahaa.
Esitin merkintäni lopussa myös kolme itseäni askarruttanutta kysymystä, joista kahteen sain laajat ja hyvät vastaukset suoraan (tai no, parin käännöskierroksen jälkeen) CreamAID'in työntekijältä. Vastaukset poistivat itseltäni ainakin muutaman epäilyksen, joten tässä tietoa muillekin.
Jos yrityksen markkinoima tuote olisi ihan oikeasti hyvä ja
erinomainen, eivätkö blogaajat kirjoittaisi siitä joka tapauksessa,
myös ilman eri maksua?
Yes, this is true for early adopters. However, CREAMaid is targeted at more lazy guys :-) Most companies experience chasm because they have trouble extending their customer pools. Most of the companies fail because they only have early adopter fans, and they fail to extend their customer network to more ordinary people.
These "ordinary" people are not easily motivated to write or talk about what they like. For example, if you went to a jazz festival and enjoyed it, you might write about it in your blog, but many others(actually many many others) will just keep the experience in their minds and never share it with others.
We want to let those people come out and share those stories with others and make a community so that they can meet new people who share the same interest. This is good for them as well as for the festival officials.
This would not be possible without reward, because then, only early adopters will be talking to one another, and the resulting community will just be that of early adopters, and early adopters are not that many, and their number doesn't grow.
We want to fucntion as a kind of stimulus, so that ordinary people, as well as the early adopters, will be motivated to talk about what they like. As a result, more ordinary people around them would learn about the product.
It normally takes a long time before many companies cross the chasm, and we hope we could help them shorten the process.
Pitäisikö blogien lukijoiden tietää jos kirjoittaja ansaitsee kyseisestä kirjoituksestaan rahaa?
The most important issue regarding our service would be about the disclosure, like you have pointed out.
We thought that the inclusion of widget itself would be the way to disclose the fact that the contents are part of a marketing process.
In order to participate in the marketing process, bloggers must get a code for the widget and include it inside their posts, which means that all the participating blog posts will have a widget included somewhere inside.
In fact, we're not trying to hide this fact from anyone.
An issue might be that we do not have any messages like "Ads by CREAMaid" included somewhere inside the widget. However we thought that it would be awkward to put the message like that inside the widget, since they are not actually Ads.
What we're trying to do is to bring companies and their happy customers together, so if we position the contents as "Ads", it would be rude because the contents are not just "static texts" written by advertisers, but actually "experiences" or "opinions" written by ordinary people.
It would be easier to understand what we are aiming at if you visit our site and take a look at our McDonald's campaign. Currently we have gathered several posts from around the world(although not much yet), and we think those photos and their stories mean a lot even if it didn't contain any judgment.
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McDonald's kampanjaan voi tutustua CreamAID'in etusivulla olevan widgetin kautta ja sen, miltä mukaan osallistuvan bloggaajan blogimerkintä näyttää, voi nopeasti tarkistaa vaikka täältä. CreamAID-yhteys näkyy siis selvästi blogimerkinnässä.
Myös muiden kuin aikaisten omaksujien aktivointi on varmasti tärkeää, jos yritys haluaa saada asiakkaidensa hyviä kokemuksia verkkoon. Tästä olen täysin samaa mieltä. Mutta itse pelkään, että rahan avulla aktivoinnin lopputuloksena voi pahimmillaan olla sarja suhteellisen mitättömiä asiakaspalautteita, kuten ylläolevassa Mäkkärin esimerkissä.
Jään innolla katsomaan, mihin suuntaan tämä projekti kehittyy. Minulle on luvattu myös pian postittaa demotunnukset, jotta pääsen kokeilemaan CreamAID'ia ihan käytännössäkin. Joten jos joku asiakkaistamme olisi tästä kiinnostunut, niin ei muuta kuin ottamaan yhteyttä!