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By B.L. Ochman Technorati is providing a way for corporations to join the online conversation and maintain a level of control of their message in an interesting display of its expanding for-pay services. In the first example of its 18-month deal with Paramount Classics, Technorati is providing “featured” (aka positive) blog post links for Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” MySpace movie blog and links to “conversations about global warming.”
It’s a twist on contextual advertising, scraping blog posts instead of ads that relate to page content. Readers can see both positive and negative blog posts by clicking on “see all posts” at the bottom of the featured posts.
The “conversations” take readers right to the comments page of each post about global warming.
According to Technorati advertising director Mike Linton, Technorati is charging Paramount for services including dynamically scraped blog content which can then be reviewed before being listed as a featured post.
Corporations Want Message Management
I’m sure this service is enormously attractive to corporations, who find the blogosphere confusing at best, even though the tools to monitor the conversation are available free. In the recent AAF Digital Media Trends survey of leading advertisers, “76% were concerned about “the ability to control brand/product image” on blogs.” Technorati’s new service addresses their desire for message management. It will not prevent blog swarms, but it will add another dimension to the conversation, and that’s a start.
Technorati currently lists 14,436 posts containing “An Inconvenient Truth,” and six are featured on Gore’s MySpace blog, which was last updated five hours ago. I haven’t watched the service long enough to know how often the featured posts are updated, but my bet is twice a day.