Mom Blogger shared this article by Juned just a few minutes ago on Facebook. In his entry, Juned shares with us that a certain blogger attended a recent corporate event and misrepresented him and two others so that the said blogger could get more freebies. Apparently the company was giving away gift checks and cooked chicken to those who attended the event. Allow me to re-post some excerpts from Juned’s blog entry:
This particular blogger whose tastes go for chicken well I will probably remember for telling a fib. “For want of more free chicken a fib the blogger told.”
And this made me laugh. One could hear the collecting sound of chicks cackling at the Chicken Blogger.
One of the bloggers who was misrepresented was supposed to be me. Oh well such things happen. And it is a source of laughter more than annoyance now. The identity of the chicken blogger is not really important. But the story or more exactly the rumor is. In that it provides a funny tale from the local blogosphere. What would be next bringing people- friends, family members and help – in to get extra freebies? It Is a funny world indeed.
I’ve been to a fair share of blogger events in the last few years as well as traditional press conferences. While it’s okay really to get some freebies, swag, or gift checks for attending, what happened in Juned’s story was just a little too much. Mom Blogger also raised a very important point about this — do PR companies actually research about the bloggers they want to invite or do they just send out random e-vites? Due diligence on the part of the PR company might also help in avoiding situations like this.
Do they even have the tools to monitor the results of their blogger invites? You just simply dont invite bloggers and expect instant viral success…
PR agencies usually just use the following metrics to determine if their blogger initiative was successful:
1. Number of bloggers who physically attended the event (vs the number of bloggers invited and committed to client)
2. Number of bloggers who wrote articles about the event or product (vs the total number of bloggers who were present)
I’m not saying this is the best way to measure success (obviously) but this is the common practice these days in the Philippines.
We actually had the same issue here in Cebu.
In a chismis snippet section called “Mao Ba!” of Cebu Daily News:
“Bloggers sprout like mushrooms after a storm in every press conference where freebies are handed out. But it has been whispered that they bring with them their friends who claim to be bloggers who also bring other friends who are so-called bloggers. Conference organizers would be unable to trace their lineage pretty soon.”
If that’s the problem then I think the PR agency or the event organizer is at fault. If they have limited goodie bags or freebies then they should pre-select the bloggers they’re going to bring in and give them event passes.
But yeah, that happens here too.
As a Filipino-Christian blogger who writes 95% of the time about music, I often gently turn down invitations for events that aren’t even closely related to my genres of choice (music, tech, politics, health, faith). I feel badly, though, for those event planners who do invite me to unrelated events, more often than not because I wonder how they go about selecting their blogger guests. Not everyone with a thousands-per-day traffic clip can promise a spot-on blog entry for an event planner; it may even backfire if they’re not careful.
Good piece, Carlo.
I think my comment did not get through. The Chicken blogger is a metaphor. I am aware of some events that probably prompted Juned to write this entry. They are so annoying that I don’t want to attend events with large number of invitees.