The Evil Marketer

Via the wires, SuperPages.com is launching a “reviewer of the week” system that has all the right things: it’s local, it ranks reviewers, and the reviews promote products and services. Hell they even use the term “trusted individuals” to describe the reviewers. Over time reviewers who are more active get ranked higher; that’s not the best case scenario — they should let users have more say as to which reviewers are doing the best job. Eventually there will be a handful of reviewers in each locality for each niche, and these influencers will then be in a position to demand a cut of the action (as they should).

People will only spend energy doing things for free until they find out that someone else is making money from their effort. That’s when things get interesting. Monetizing CGM is, after all, not as much about us evil marketers accessing audiences as it is about users flipping the hierarchy on its head and taking power away from the companies that rely on them.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 1st, 2007 at 10:49 pm and is filed under CGM, influencer network, influencers, marketing future, social networks, networks, Evil. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.