Many of you probably spotted this post on Gawker last week about the hypocritical “pay-me” blogosphere. A survey recently conducted by APCO on the “state of blog relations,” apparently suggested that bloggers are asking for a little palm grease from the PR industry.
I wonder if that was intentional.
This survey was distributed to bloggers and PR people in order to compare the responses from each group. Let’s look at the question that evokes that response. According to Gawker:
And the biggest disconnect of all didn’t really make the bloggers look like the righteous bunch. 96% of flacks disagreed with this statement: “It is okay to compensate bloggers for writing about my clients, but it is not up to me to tell them to disclose the payment.”
But almost half of bloggers agreed. They want to get paid, yo!
That suggests to me that the question on the survey looked something like this:
Do you agree or disagree with the following statement:
It is okay to compensate bloggers for writing about my clients, but it is not up to me to tell them to disclose the payment.
I smell confounding variables. That is a two-part statement, and I could choose to agree or disagree to either part, neither part, both parts, who knows. A better survey would have broken them out:
Do you agree or disagree with the following statments:
1. It is okay to compensate bloggers for writing about my clients
2. It is not up to me to tell bloggers to disclose the payment
I suspect that most PR people thought to themselves “well, I’m OK with paying bloggers, I guess, but if I pay them I’d better tell them to disclose the payment.” So they marked disagree.
Similarly, most bloggers probably thought to themselves “I don’t mind getting paid every now and then, but damnit it’s on my terms, it’s my blog, and I’ll decide when, where, and how to make a full disclosure.” So they marked agree.
Are there some bloggers who are out there to make some cash by being dishonest? Of course. Does this survey prove that “some bloggers” is 50% of the blogosphere? Hardly.
As Mark Twain once said, “facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.”
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