Your Kamloops blog ranks right up there

As of last Friday, Arjun Singh’s Your Kamloops blog was ranked 1,603,173 in popularity among all blogs. That’s not bad, considering there are something like 130 million blogs around.

This is one of the things I learned at the “Social Media Marketing Bootcamp” workshop put on by Capulet Communications and co-sponsored by Venture Kamloops and the Kamloops Chamber of Commerce last week.

Now, if I had only learned how to use technorati.com, which ranks all the blogs, I could find out where the armchairmayor sits in the scheme of things. On the other hand, it’s probably just as well I don’t know.

The workshop was an excellent overview of the social media phenomenon. I was, of course, particularly interested in some of the differences between social media and traditional media.

I almost jumped out of my chair when Darren Barefoot of Capulet mentioned that one of the great benefits of blogging is that you get free stuff. As an example, he noted a blogger who writes about food, and recently received a $400 blender, free.

“So, it’s OK to take bribes?” I asked.

Which set off a discussion, in which I was outnumbered around 15 to one. Everybody else in the room saw nothing wrong with accepting free products in return for writing about them.

In the “traditional” media, this just doesn’t happen. It’s a credibility thing: if you receive a free whatzit, how can your written opinion of its value be considered unbiased? So, gifts received by our reporters are turned in, and auctioned off each Christmas season with the proceeds going to charity.

Barefoot raised a good question, which I didn’t answer particularly well at the time. He pointed out that newspaper reporters accept free tickets to concerts. Well, actually, our reporters generally use tickets received by the paper as part of advertising/sponsorship deals, but that’s not really the point.

Traditional media have another rule: we don’t pay for the news. This might seem to conflict with the no-gift rule, but it works. Interesting discussion, though.

In the blogosphere, raw rumor, libel and the taking of freebies are apparently perfectly alright.

Which brings up the Prada bags. If you pay attention to the front page of The Daily News, you’ll know two Thompson Rivers University administrators are in a bit of hot water for accepting free Prada bags from a potential partner of the university in Malaysia.

The whole issue of gift giving and receiving by public and business officials revolves around two things: culture and perception. I’m going to delve into that some more in tomorrow’s Armchair Mayor column in The Daily News.