There's been quite the kerfuffle - brought into prominence once again this past two weeks - over bloggers' presence at fashion and beauty events. Comments and opinions have gone all over the place. Accusations have been leveled. Catfights have occured. Childishness has resurged. Wackiness has ensued.

Some print journalists are saying that bloggers aren't real journalists, and so what right do they have showing up at beauty/fashion events and calling themselves media (or letting the companies give them media credentials)? Bloggers have fired back that they are professional writers (some are), that they are industry insiders (some are), and that they deserve the same kinds of privilege as print journalists (some do, some don't.) Some journalists and bloggers have speculated on the need for some kind of regulation of beauty bloggers. Extreme persons on all sides of the current debate have gone to great lengths to make “the other side” look infantile, foolish, stupid, and generally inferior. The issue seems to boil down to privileges: who gets them, who doesn't, and under what conditions or qualifications.

Rather than looking at this from the viewpoint of old-school journalists versus new-school journalists (with whom I group commercial bloggers), let's look at it from the point of the folks controlling the much-desired and -debated privileges: the fashion and beauty companies.

For quite some time, anyone selling a product or service had to gather customer feedback themselves (or have third parties gather it for them) to find out what customers thought. For at least 150 years (probably much much longer, but for purposes of this writeup I'll use the “150 years” figure - this takes us back to the late 1800s, when the literate middle class was burgeoning in Europe and America, and the post was definitely active in both places), this “information gathering” was done by in-person conversations, man-on-the-street polls, and receiving customer letters. Companies might hear about occasional instances of word-of-mouth advertising; but there wasn't an easy way to track, or even find, the bulk of such person-to-person recommendations. Once the telephone was in widespread use - say, around the 1950s - companies began to get customer feedback using that method of communication. With all of these methods of data collection, companies could get a sense of general trends by analyzing masses of collected information, and could get notice (at varying speeds) of things that customers either didn't like or didn't have but wanted. With each new form of media - letters, telegraph, telephone - companies were able to collect more customer feedback, and have a tiny bit more two-way interaction with its customer base. However, any customers who didn't contact the company, or who weren't solicited for those polls or didn't take part in these conversations, were effectively “unheard” opinions. Since humans tend not to take action unless they feel strongly about something - and that's usually a negative something - the feedback companies got was better than nothing…but as time went on, it became more apparent that these feedback methods didn't provide a comprehensive picture of who was thinking what about the products.

Fast forward through the 1950s up to the mid-1990s. The internet, which had previously only really been used in certain governmental and academic circles since its creation in 1969, was suddenly being used by larger groups of people in first-world nations (read: buyers of products). These people used forums and mailing lists to share information and opinions. In the latter half of the 1990s, people started creating personal web sites…and web logs (blogs). Services like LiveJournal and Blogger brought “push-button publishing” to the multitude of people who didn't know how to install or configure web scripts…but could certainly type words into a web form and hit a button that would then publish those words to the internet, to be accessed by anyone with an internet connection. In the bottom half of the 90s, companies started acting on the fact that they could get feedback through places like GeNIE, CompuServe, AOL forums, and of course all the various other forms of online communication.

Now, if you're a company selling something directly to consumers - wouldn't you be fairly interested in getting as much feedback about your product and / or service as you possibly could, from as many sources as you possibly could? Wouldn't you be interested in the opinions of anyone who might potentially want to buy your product? And if collecting this information cost you much less than traditional advertising/market research methods and gave you information about previously unheard-from (or marginalized) potential consumers…wouldn't you be all over this like white on rice?

This is one of the reasons companies are courting bloggers: these bloggers, whether they're formally trained / professional journalists or no, have audiences; those audiences contain potential sources of money for these companies; and while many folks my age and younger have grown up with an inherent cynicism of “traditional” advertising (and fewer of us watch broadcast television, we just TiVO everything and fast-forward over the commercials), we trust blogs a bit more (or we distrust them a bit less). From the companies' standpoint, if they can get the bloggers - the holders of influence - genuinely interested in their product or service, those bloggers will give the companies word-of-mouth advertising, which is one of the most highly regarded forms of advertising. (Switch back to your own viewpoint for a few seconds: when you're deciding to buy a new product or service and go looking for opinions or recommendations, who do you trust more: advertising by the company itself? An article in a print publication like Consumer Reports or Allure or Cosmo? A recommendation from a trusted friend? I know that I'll evaluate the first two, and they may pique my interest somewhat, but the deal-clincher [or deal-breaker] for me is often a friend or family member who says, “I've used that and here's what I think about it.”) Courting bloggers as holders-of-influence is just the newest figure of the dance - and it's going to continue, because it's a way for companies to reach audiences that are not reached, or not heavily penetrated, by magazines, television, radio, and other forms of advertising. And companies courting journalists was all about advertising and making money for them - don't ever lose sight of that fact. If companies could get money from people by influencing their family pets, or by wearing neon camo-print, or by speaking in Pig-latin, they'd do it - as long as the cost of doing so did not exceed the potential revenue to be earned.

Since society as a whole is still learning how to measure blogs' influence, there will be a period of learning and adjustment as companies figure out to whom they want to extend privileges, and how much privilege they want to extend to those persons. I'm sure that there will, in the future, be a clearer definition and social convention for commercial blogs - those who actively want to use their blogs to accrue compensation for themselves - and noncommercial blogs - such as my own, those who are sharing because of an enthusiasm for the topic, and compensation is distinctly secondary or even tertiary, if it's even a concern or goal. Even once companies have figured out their criteria for who is a primary candidate for trade-show and event privilege, companies will continue to try and use any avenues for both spreading information about their products, and gathering feedback about same. This dust-up won't settle down any time soon. And just as it starts to settle down, a new media format will emerge, the battlefield will simply shift lines, and the whole argument will begin again.

But at this point, the folks who are upset about their perceived lessening of privilege seem to be forgetting that they are neither the granters nor the revokers of that privilege which they're clinging to so fiercely.

Frankly, they remind me of folks who are adamantly opposed to same-sex marriage based largely on the grounds that same-sex marriages would somehow invalidate their own. The beauty journalists who are so eager to hang on to exclusivity of privilege seem to be forgetting why they were given the privileges in the first place. Sorry, y'all, you were just used for the influence that you had - and more people now have similar influence, and the companies are going to try and use that influence to their own benefit…same as they did with the print-media content producers.

Like this entry? Check these out:

or look at other entries tagged with

Share This Page

Comments