Marc's Voice

Marqui “Pay Bloggers to Blog” program

So I convinvced Marqui, this small little company in Vancouver to start a program called “Pay Bloggers to Blog”.

We created a coolio demo to show people what “Communications Management” was all about. It’s the day in the life of a press release.

We made it to Businessweek this week and we’re about to expand the program up to 20 bloggers. The goal is to generate leads for both developers and sales opportunities. If we can generate enough - we’ll expand the program even further.

To give you an idea of what’s happening here - here’s a letter from Janet Johnson, VP of Marketing to our bloggers…… (NOTE: These people are for real - they’re spending $180k on this….)

Hi all,

I’m one of the busy hands at Marqui, and have used the product for the past couple of months to build our own web site. I joined the company because I was so impressed with the product, and I’m the target audience for it. I’m not a gear head, but I’m looking forward to talking about how amazing it is for me to be able to build and maintain our site. In the past, I’ve had teams of people who did it for me, and I had to depend on others to get it done.

I admit, I can’t wait to start telling the world about it. I will jump in and blog – heck, if I can build a web site using Marqui, I feel comfortable talking about it from personal experience. I’m honored to join the blogging community. Seems like a heck of an amazing, influential world.

To talk about the philosophy behind all this in an e-mail thread seems a bit sad (to a bunch of bloggers), but I must add my .02 about why we’ve chosen to do this (until I get officially blogging). Actually, I’ll probably post this as a thread on our site! And I can do it myself, this afternoon.

1) We sell to marketers.

2) We’re interested in making Web 2.0 a better ‘version’ than 1.0.

3) We like the ideas of focus groups, advisors, analysts, and developers being exposed to our solution. We’re a small company, and don’t have a lot of money to spend on every activity we would like. We also like the idea of bloggers talking about their particular interests in the world.

4) Believe it or not, we have a company value (a bit unspoken) of making the world a better place – through our products, actions and words. Much like we’d pay an analyst to get them to cover our products (good or bad) we believe we have an opportunity to have the next-generation of analysts (good for us, and good for you!) paid for covering our products. We have trust in the transparency of our relationships with the bloggers we pay. And the integrity (a certified company value) to stick with them, contractually.

5) And yes. We get PR. It’s either going to be a spectacular success, or an amazing failure. Either way, it’s a huge social experiment. And we hope other companies will join us in the experiment.

I’m not sure what the “preview” question pertains to, but if it’s like my experience, I have pop-up blockers that prevent me from previewing in one way (from the little tab that follows me as I add content), but allow me to preview from the web pages or console tab. Perhaps that will help. Otherwise, I’m sure someone will dig into it.

As I said, I’m not a gear head. I’m just a marketer, trying to get the word out about Marqui. Y’all have been an amazing group of people to try it with.

Janet Johnson