One of the most disturbing and irritating new marketing trends is companies who send out marketing spam with links to their “impartial and informative” industry blogs which are nothing more than sales pitches in disguise. Bad disguises. Bad disguises that generally never fool anyone touting “trends” and “directions” in their respective industry.
Their “Featured Articles” are generally no more than detailed articles about industry products strikingly similar to products the sponsoring company offers. Surprise, surprise. This has been going on for a while now but it’s becoming more prolific. The biggest problem this trend presents is the way it makes it difficult to find real information about an industry trend or technology without the bias of a corporate revenue agenda. In other words: they screw up the Google search results.
On a few occasions I’ve been asked to write a blog article for various technology manufacturers. Once I accepted such an offer from a company that manufactures PDU’s (power distribution units) and my writing was soundly rejected, as expected, because I told the truth. The truth was occasionally counter to the companies product offering even though they claim their published articles are unbiased opinion. Bullshit. I never accepted another offer to write an article for a corporate “blog”.