Good heavens. McDonaldsA new viral marketing company will pay you $10 to take a photo at McDonalds and blog your experience. I suppose at least when you blog it it’s kind of obvious what you’re doing, you get a big fat widget explaining it at the bottom of your blog post.
In a way I sort of like the transparency of this (um, well, sort of) but surely someone will do the nasty on McDonalds soon and write horrid stuff and still want their $10?
Update: I can’t read Italian, but this response looks interesting – it calls Creamaid’s campaigns “dressed conversations”, in contrast to the Naked Conversations Robert Scoble and Shel Israel write about in their book on blogs and marketing.
bernard
How do you go about getting the 10 dollars ?
Jane McG
So weird– McDonald’s is actually (purportedly) unaffiliated with this initiative. If you visit the site, the host explains that they are a basically a new Web 2.0 company testing their beta app. I suppose they are using McDonald’s as a “test client” without actually being paid or officially engaged by the company. The motto of the company “anyone can go viral” is interesting… an attempt to formalize an approach to viral marketing, which to date has been very hit or miss. (Do something weird or crazy, hope it gets attention, and then fan the flames of the blogosphere…)
Jill
Jane, I hadn’t actually noticed that – I guess I blogged it kind of fast… But you’re quite right – the campaign is by Creamaid which is a company that just opened their beta a couple of weeks ago. They’ve set up four “test conversations” with different royalty levels to test the system I guess. You also get a “referral fee” if someone else clicks your widget and “joins the conversations” (i.e. blogs about the product) through the system.
Will be interesting to see how this works out – personally I feel like my blog would be sort of sullied if I did it, and I don’t like McDonalds either, but it does seem like a more honest way of doing viral marketing than just spamming discussion fora as Coca Cola did recently.
nick
Jill, you forgot to post your photo.
Jill
Oh no, now I won’t get my ten dollars!!! Heh.
Jane McG
Jill– agreed on both counts… I would only feel good about participating in this kind of marketing if I really loved the product. For instance, I would be more than happy to put up a Creamaid conversation post/gadget on my blog about the weekly Battlestar Galactica episodes, or about the new DDR game, or anything else that I would want to support and felt was at least a little relevant to my blog topic and audience. Other items would feel way icky. At the same time,yes, yes, yes– way better to have this level of transparency than secret buzz marketing or fake-persona forum posting. I’m not sure this would actually work to generate buzz, but at least it’s fairly open. I like that.
jill/txt » PayPerPay: a sneakier kind of blog advertising
[…] It turns out there are plenty of sites like Creamaid, which I wrote about the other day, out there. PayPerPost is one of the biggest, so I signed up to see what it’s like. And um, also because one of the featured “opportunities” was writing about World of Warcraft and you’d get $3 for a post on that, the front page said, and hey, I already write about World of Warcraft all the time. Like Creamaid, the deal is you write about requested topics and are paid from three to ten dollars for your post. Once you’re signed up you get access to all the “opportunities”. Currently there are about a hundred – but to my slight distress I couldn’t find the write-about-WoW “opportunity”. Others varied in their degree of detail. Some are very specific: The post should describe about culture and how marriage affects culture. It should cover the topics., 1) Is Marriage Really needed? 2) Asians gives more value to marriage, For example in India, I see that Online matrimonial Portals are making a great income. For example, i came across, Bharatmatrimony.com, It seems to be the leader of online Matrimonial services. 3) They try several innovative ideas, like, launching of the First matrimonial toolbar, Also Provides RSS feeds., Even yahoo has shown an interest on them and has invested in them. (https://payperpost.com/blogger/opportunity/detail/765) […]
Strategi p?• nett ‚Äì Schibsted vs r??kla « Arne Krokan
[…] Det er kanskje ikke ?• undres over at McDonalds for en tid tilbake kj??rte en reklamekampanje i USA der de ga 10 dollar til alle som tok bilde av burgeren sin, skrev om den p?• bloggen, og lenket tilbake til McDonalds eget nettsted. Ved ?• gi reklampengene direkte til forbrukerne selv, skaffet de seg b?•de gjenkj??p og ??kt synlighet p?• nettet. […]