Is Your Blog The Show Or The Commercial?

Because whether we’ve meant to or not, we’ve turned the social media landscape in to this:

Every day as I scroll twitter, looking for the interesting/thought provoking/funny things my friends say, on every screen I will inevitably be hit - blam! - with another tweet that’s nothing more than an ad.

“Our <insert brand name> Adventure!”

“We tried a new <insert brand> recipe!”

“Join my <insert brand hashtag> twitter party!”

More and more, I follow a friend to see what they have to say, and then get barraged with links about their brand sponsored post.

You know what it’s called when you’re consuming something and a message from a brand pops up in the middle of it, right?

It’s called a commercial.

Except you’re not getting paid anywhere NEAR what a network would be paid.

And there’s the problem.

We’re flogging brands for nothing.

We’re taking time away from our families for pennies.

We are television channels filled with commercials and no shows.

I used to write a product blog. I loved it. I never made a penny on it, and I didn’t care. It was a labour of my own heart. I found products I loved and wrote about them all by myself. Soon I started getting pitches, offers of product, offers of traffic and links. And that was kind of fun, for a while, but it wasn’t why I was writing it. I was writing it because I believed in it.

Then I got disillusioned. For a lot of reasons. And one big one was that I found myself doing work for big brands with big marketing budgets - for nothing. They wanted me to talk about them, for the sake of a free water filter or eco mop.

It wasn’t cool. It wasn’t cool at all.

And when I got busy, and when I got disillusioned, it was easy to let the blog go in to hibernation, because I wasn’t doing it for anyone else. I was doing it for me. And I wanted to walk away for a while. And I could, because it was mine. I didn’t have to force myself to phone it in because I had brand commitments. When I needed a break, I took it. Because I could.

I realized that working with a big brand wasn’t the way to “make it” in the blogosphere. The people that I have the most respect for, the people that I always want to talk to, the people that I want to Be Like aren’t the ones who do the most work with brands. They are the people who were good writers. Sure, they work with brands sometimes too, but they are always true to themselves in their writing and in the way they present their work with the brand. There is never a “Here Is My Review For This Free Thing I Got” post; rather, there was a reason that product appeared in conjunction with that blogger. Because it fit. It made sense. The presence of the blogger as an enhancement, not a shill.

A couple of years ago, I took every single ad off this blog. Why? Because I didn’t want to have any contractual obligations to anyone else about what I do in my own space. I don’t want to be required to phone in a post to satisfy a clause in a contract when I have nothing to say. I don’t want to be prevented from talking about a something I believe in because it conflicts with a brand that’s appearing in an ad. I want to be ME in this space. And with those ads, I was giving all of that away. I was compromising ME.

Enough.

Stop compromising you. Stop shilling everyone who offers you a product or a little bit of dough. Start telling me about YOU. I don’t want to know what you think about your Super New Floor Cleaning Product unless I am specifically in the market for a super new floor cleaning product. I want to know about YOU.

When you write your blog, what are you telling me? Are you telling me about you, or about someone else’s product?

Are you a commercial, or are you a show?