Bloggers gain clout with corporations

Published 7:14 pm Monday, December 6, 2010

MINNEAPOLIS — Amanda Rettke started to blog when she was pregnant and hungry for a place to share the excitement and fear of parenthood. Five years later, she stood in the lobby at General Mills headquarters, staring at a sign welcoming “some of the most influential bloggers from across the country.”

With three young kids, Rettke is used to working hard to have her voice heard. Now the people at General Mills “were asking our opinions and really seeking our feedback,” she said. “It really did feel special.”

Rettke was one of 30 bloggers invited recently to the sprawling General Mills campus for Baking with Betty, a two-day, all-expenses-paid event giving bloggers a chance to bake in Betty Crocker’s kitchen, taste new products and, the company hopes, create an army of Betty Crocker disciples in the digital world.

As the marketing industry has become more fractured — with television, print, Internet and social media all vying for ad dollars and consumer eyeballs — companies like General Mills are trying new ideas to see what sticks, including wooing bloggers.

There are more than 133 million blogs, averaging 900,000 posts per day. For a company like General Mills, these people are potentially some of their biggest advocates or their worst critics. Their word-of-mouth reactions can reach thousands of people — or more. But by offering free products, access to new recipes, and some old-fashioned attention, General Mills hopes to influence the discourse, for far less than they spend on traditional advertising.

“People are more likely to believe another person than a company,” said David Hopkins, a brand expert at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. Plus word-of-mouth “costs less and is more effective.”

Which is why, as regulators and the industry struggle with the ethical implications, the practice is growing. A recent report from Technorati, a search engine of blogs, found that about one-third of bloggers have been approached by a brand to write about their products. Narrow that to mom bloggers, and 54 percent have been contacted.

For companies there is little risk. One of the primary rules among product-reviewing bloggers is an axiom mothers would be proud of: If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

While some bloggers, such as Rettke, sign up with advertising networks that have their own rules governing blog posts that involved paid-for trips, giveaways and other compensation from companies, others see themselves as people of influence who should get paid for their opinions.

Migdalia Rivera, a former New York paralegal who writes the blog LatinaOnAMission.com and attended Baking with Betty, says that bloggers are getting bolder about asking for compensation.

Most recently, Ralph Lauren has been keeping Rivera and her two sons clothed in exchange for promoting the brand on her blog.

Some groups, such as the Milk Processors Education Program, pay her for posts about the health benefits of drinking milk.

That range within the blogosphere has created an increasingly murky landscape for consumers looking for advice. The Federal Trade Commission is so worried about the blurred boundary between advertising and content that it revised its endorsement guidelines last year to make sure bloggers tell readers when they are getting something of value for free or are being paid to write a review.