Here's someone, LFP, who does a great work breaking the Blogrush marketing team into pieces. Would directly offer a link but there is no url just for this post, so here it is:
LPF Says:
October 11th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
Well, now the fun starts!
I estimate about half of the posters have been sucking up to you these last 3 weeks, because they know their blogs aren’t going to pass muster. And perhaps you have been swayed by them. Junk blogs are still appearing in the widget.
You now have the unpleasant task of removing these smarmy bloggers and facing their wrath. If you had thought things out carefully before launch, you wouldn’t have to go through with this now.
“This is a MAJOR update.
The service is not even 30 days old, yet we’re about to release more changes than most Internet startups do in their first 6 months.”
Pardon me, but your ego is showing. That statement might impress some of your readers but not the web designers/developers.
You can’t compare this 30 days old service to 6-month-old Internet startups. Those startups are all done with their betas and almost fully operational upon launch. They don’t NEED the changes.
It’s not a good sign to have “shocking” changes and “major updates” during the first 30 days. Shows how buggy the system is and how inefficient your team is. You did promise us it would take only a week to make the update. It is now 3 weeks on and still not ready, and now you say you “hope to have it completely released within 7 days”.
Frankly, I don’t see anything major about the changes. It’s still not fully operational, with lots of basic stuff still not fixed. Looks like all you did was plaster on a bunch of Bandaids.
“New User Interface: More options, more reporting, more features.”
“Per Post Statistics & Addition Of “Buzz Meter” ”
These aren’t absolutely necessary. But okay.
“Custom Reports”
IMO, another unnecessary item. Since we don’t have much control over who sees which blogs, custom reports don’t help much. The stats are good enough. Why give yourself more work by offering custom reports which most won’t use or need anyway?
“Bonus Syndication For All Users, But Weighted Towards Low-Traffic Members.
All members of our network will be receiving bonus syndication but we’ll be giving more bonus credits to our members that need it most — ones with low-traffic.”
Uh, what does this mean in plain English? So low-traffic members get extra credits? Why?
And how does this tie in with the following statement?
“We are working on something that might give members with poor widget performance a “warning” to let them know they are in danger of being removed from the network;”
Some posters said they did not get any warnings before being removed.
“More Categories! (A lot more)”
Well and good! But, um, who drew up the list of categories? And who decides which category each blog goes into? Several posts in here indicate that there is a problem with this area of the system.
“Improved Security & Abuse Measures (We’ve already squashed 95% of the cheaters!)”
Really? Most of the quality blogs have long abandoned ship. Leaving you with a motley collection of mostly low-quality blogs and cheaters, and only a handful of quality blogs. The cheaters are in the minority, I would say 10% or 15% of the total. If you’ve gotten rid of 95% of them, you’re still left with a whole lot of junk blogs.
“100% Manual Review & New Quality Guidelines”
“Widget Performance Monitoring”
I repeat. It’s impossible to manually review all blogs and re-review them periodically to ensure they stay within guidelines. I wondered about the rationality of this statement when you first said it. And I’m still wondering.
You do realise too, don’t you, that quite a lot of the posters in here will have to be ditched. The desperation in their flattery of BR and you is just too obvious.
“We are committed to maintaining the highest level of INTEGRITY and QUALITY for our network.”
“It will now be a PRIVILEDGE for a blog to be accepted into our network.”
This is just plain hype. Why not just ’show us the money’?
The fact is that bloggers will be the ones who choose to join or not, based on their assessment of not only the system’s effectiveness but also of its quality. Right now, I would say you have a serious problem with quality.
I also think you are being too protective of your “early adopters”, from the way you sounded in an earlier post. Early adopters or not, if they are junk, they are junk. You need to dump them. Where’s the integrity in keeping “early adopters” who are junk at the expense of shutting out newer quality blogs?
“The BlogRush system is based on TWO things: QUALITY and FAIRNESS.”
“As I said, BlogRush was designed as a FAIR system. There’s a reason it was created as a COOPERATIVE network. It’s so its members can work together to generate more targeted readers for their blogs.”
Doesn’t look like it. Poster Roy above of FortuneSeeker blog has a very good point. Compare his blog, which appears to have been disapproved (and which I think is a quality blog), to FindCash blog, which appears to have been approved (and which I hope will not appear in my widget).
“DO YOU HAVE THE WIDGET PLACED REALLY LOW ON YOUR BLOG?
If so, you need to move it higher on your blog to give it better placement.
Don’t want to do that? THEN PLEASE REMOVE IT COMPLETELY.”
“So any member that’s only willing to put the BlogRush widget at the very bottom of their blog isn’t a member we want in our network — and our network will deliver more traffic, per member, without them.”
It’s not nice being told how we should layout our blogs. You’ve fixed the widget colour and width issues. Why can’t the system be such that where you place the widget dictates how many credits and impressions you get? That will take care of the problem. If members want their impressions, clicks and credits, then they will know the best placement for it. Why do you want to have to force members to put the widget in an ‘in your face’ placement?
The whole purpose of BR is to generate traffic. Or is it not? Is it just to benefit the “early adopters”? It may not be a pyramid scheme, but it sure has a pyramid structure.
C’mon. People don’t need the traffic just so they can read tons of blogs all day long in order to ‘help’ other bloggers.
Why does anyone need traffic? To get better search rankings. To get more click-through rates. To get more sales conversions. Ultimately, to earn more money.
Pfiuuu! Heavy stuff man. I love this guy!
