A LOT has been written these past few days about CREAMaid beta. Especially in connection with McDonald’s, and what has very quickly been dubbed a feeble attempt to buy link love, by the multinational. A WEEK AGO – that is, waaaay before this story started spreading like wildfire on Danish and international blogs (and into print media – I read the story early this morning in one of a billion free newspapers i Cph.) CREAMaid had this to say on their own blog:
All the Conversations on our site right now are created by us.
These are for our opening event, as well as for testing our service
to see how it could be used and improved.
We picked some sites and businesses that we like and decided to
experiment on promoting them using our system.
If you are one of the officials at those companies/websites, and
are offended by our attempt, we apoligize. Please let us know.
If you are interested, let us know also.
I don’t know what to think about the campaign itself. As a blogger, I should be out shouting that this idea would never work, because bloggers have way more integrity that your average Joe, and because readers are far to critical to ever buy into stunts like this – but I’m simply not that sure.
Let’s face it – blogs are websites – simple as that. of course coorperations are bound to explore the possibilities inherent in some 57 million websites out there, and of course they are going to penetrate to some extent at some point. Let’s not be overly religious about the power and pureness of the blogosphere…
But all that aside for now. What makes me wonder, is how noone, it would seem, took the time to fact check before throwing themselves at this story. Am I the only one raising an eyebrow here?
Oh yeah, btw, if you wanna have a look-see at the blog post you can check it out here, on the official CREAMaid blog. (no permalink so scroll down to the post of 10/13/2006)
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