Selling Your Reputation On The Web
It sounds less …crass, to talk about valuing your ‘brand’ and respecting your loyal readership, and displaying integrity via adhering to ethical principles, and practicing transparency… oh, and, replacing the for sale sign with ‘monetization opportunity’.
The blogosphere offers fascinating studies in shifting relationships between business and the consumer. No successful online community previously empowered the individual to this extent.
eBay, for example, enables individuals but deliberately ‘masses’ them. One could even say that, by insisting on remaining ‘just a venue’ and ignoring unethical and fraudulent behavior for too long it actively disabled individuals.
Previous communities which empower individuals are, for the most part, either protected cloisters, or ingrown special interest groups, or traditional grass roots movements.
Until blogging, individual empowerment has been extremely limited. Only those very few tech sophisticated enough to build and promote their own web presence successfully, or wealthy enough to pay for it, were previously empowered.
No one has come up with the next chapter yet, either. Currently popular ventures include Threadless (which is grassroots and promotes the current zeitgeist through aggregation of popular opinion on individual contributions), ASPs such as the fab 37signals suite, and enhancing the public space with privacy tools like Vox does. Although each of these examples is enabling in its way, all are private need centered.
Communality and the wisdom of crowds also has its place, and always will, but I doubt that anyone can subsume individual empowerment …put the genie back in the bottle, if you will.
The future of individual voices on the web is not traditional journalism, but it is the prominent bloggers who came from old media that, more than anyone, sit visibly in the awkward fast lane of this new form where consumers and business are converging.
They are in the fast lane because they have the training and skills to write prolifically and get read, which means that their traffic is substantial compared to most individuals on the web. As money tries to figure out how to buy all this traffic and attention, it is natural for the voices with the largest audiences to stand out.
They’re in the most awkward position, because part of their loyal readers’ trust is based on their perceived purity and impartiality. That this perception is faulty is totally irrelevant; the fact is that old media (who used to pay their bills) created it. Most people believe that great reporting and journalism and television are all free. They persist in this belief even as they pay their cable or satellite bill every month. The dollars traded for a newspaper go to the company that prints it, not to their favorite columnists, and so on. At least a bit of the antagonism directed at Rush Limbaugh is because he got rich doing his thing.
The numbers of professional bloggers who have struggled the most vocally with selling their reputation is already rapidly diminishing. They can’t go on about it forever, given that they still have to eat just like everyone else, and most have made their commercial beds. Their solutions range from private sponsors, ‘transparently’ disclosed on a page most don’t visit, to tasteful and limited traditional advertising. New and creative schemes for monetization, such as the Best Buy holiday shopping bloggers that Steve Rubel posted about last night, the Goodstorm’s MeCommerce and others posted about by Mathew Ingram, as well as recommendation engine and other aggregation concepts, are beginning to map the most accessible of these uncharted waters.
Selling your reputation, and therefore the trust your followers have put in you, is something that many would, on the theoretical surface, define as a betrayal of trust. That theoretical surface of popular belief, though, is melting like thin ice when recontextualized between real people. Joe the columnist isn’t getting a salary from the local News anymore is easily comprehended by the majority of people the first time advertising pops up on Joe’s blog. Ok, says the average person, but my thoughts and opinions aren’t in the same league as Joe’s either. Then comes the realization that simple popularity, basic social skills, a very little application, can result in a decent sized MySpace network that can be translated into a few bucks. The perception of immorality disappears.
Putting the selling of our time, knowledge, and reputation into a personal context, as blogging has led many people to do, leads us to an individualized and personalized perspective on business and economics that is practical, transactional, and realistic. It is a step towards slaying, or perhaps dismantling the bogeyman of evil capitalism that has been stoked in the public imagination for decades. All but the most fervently idealogical will concede that it is not money but people who are immoral when confronting the issues on a personal level.
May this emerging consciousness see sustained growth, enhancing individual comprehension of the transactional nature of human relationships and the utilitarian nature of money, and fostering a greater understanding of reputation and trust.
