In Front Of Your Nose: An online PR blog

Andrew Bruce Smith of escherman on technology PR. And George Orwell. Mostly.

December 8, 2008 • 11:19 am

Amazon.com and open source PR (more evidence for Most Frequent Contributor power)

According to Joe Brockmeier at ZDNet, Amazon is taking an open source approach to PR:

The company has announced what it calls its “Holiday Customer Review Team.” These are six Amazon customers who are particularly active in writing product reviews that it has offered to reporters to discuss gift picks. (They also contribute their recommendations on a page on Amazon’s site.)

Amazon says that members of the team are “real people giving unbiased advice to fellow consumers. They are not employed by Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates.”

Have to admit this a twist on open source PR I hadn’t considered. However, more interesting for me was that it seemed to provide more evidence of the potential power of Most Frequent Contributors. I am curious to know whether Amazon will also have a page where these reviewers highlight their “Xmas turkeys”. In order to show real independence, you’d want them to give you guidance about things to avoid as well as check out.

Nevertheless, I’m going to keep an eye on how this open source experiment progresses.


Filed under: Technology PR, digital pr, online pr, tech pr

One Response

  1. Roger Warner says:
    December 13, 2008 at 9:08 am

    hey andy – thanks for noting this one. whenever i find myself talking/thinking of amazon and the way they ‘do’ content, i’m always blown away by the cunning genius of it all…. their ‘outsourced’ content model really does go the whole hog – and, as you say, outsourcing PR is another inspired step. may put us all out of work, but hats off to them : )

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Andrew Bruce Smith on Twitter

RSS Online PR on Twitter

RSS Online PR and Social Media (via Econsultancy)

  • The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine mortifies Facebook and for good reason January 5, 2010
    Fortunately, there's the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine. The work of Rotterdam-based Moddr, the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine lets you log off for good without much hassle. Just provide your login details for popular Web 2.0 websites you use and the Suicide Machine can do the dirty work of essentially deleting your online profiles. On Facebook, for instance, this en […]
    Patricio Robles
  • O2’s major mobile marketing spamfail January 4, 2010
    Now, I can deal with the cold weather, annoying consumers barging past me to seek out discounted high street treasure, and wall-to-wall bad TV. But I can’t deal with the fact that a mobile operator is unable or unwilling to remove me from its marketing list. It’s a marketing basic. Everybody loves a giveaway, in theory, although you couldn’t pay me to downlo […]
    Chris Lake
  • Will Google Wave be the stand-out collaboration success of 2010? January 4, 2010
    If 2009 has been the year of the social media expert (often somebody with no practical experience but a history of reposting stories, he wrote cynically...), 2010 will be the year of social collaboration. I mean this in relation to business process and internal communications, not the external facing application of social media. At the heart of this trend li […]
    James Gurd
  • Five things you need to do online in 2010 January 4, 2010
    Christmas indulgence is over and we’re all racing back to the office filled with positivity, enthusiasm and hopefully fading hangovers. If you’re planning to plough this positivity into your website then great. You’re not too late to increase your customer base through the internet and, thanks to localised search and long-tail keywords, you can still compete […]
    Kevin Gibbons
  • Free your blog comments from SEO and improve your SEO January 4, 2010
    In the beginning comments on blogs were seen as a win-win scenario. The blog owner could see that someone cared enough about the post to comment. The blog owner got some free copy. Someone else was writing for their blog; albeit just a little paragraph or so. It was still content and content was still king. The kindly person leaving the comment got something […]
    Andrew Girdwood
  • Five minutes on YouTube, a $30m Hollywood contract December 18, 2009
    But Halpern's big break looks incredibly small compared to that of Uruguayan filmmaker Fede Alvarez. According to the BBC, he has been offered a $30m contract to produce a Hollywood sci-fi film for Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures. Raimi, of course, is well-known for his work on the Spiderman films and Evil Dead series. Who is Alvarez? Alvarez is a prof […]
    Patricio Robles
  • Best of 2009: 24 social media experts interviewed December 18, 2009
    Dell's Richard Binhammer on selling via TwitterRichard talks about Dell's sales stats on Twittter, and the company's approach to social media measurement. Shel Israel talks about TwitterI recently talked to Shel about how businesses, large and small, are using Twitter. Pluck's Stephanie Himoff on social media for publishersStephanie talks […]
    Graham Charlton
  • Amazon boosts affiliate social media push on Blogger December 17, 2009
    Expanding on its effort to cash in on social media, Amazon has launched Amazon Associates for Blogger, which is designed to give bloggers on Google's popular blogging service the ability to easily add links to relevant Amazon products when they post. Amazon Associates for Blogger has two integration points: A Product Finder that enables bloggers to high […]
    Patricio Robles
  • Will Facebook's privacy blunder hurt advertisers most? December 16, 2009
    When Facebook launched, it was a private network reserved exclusively for students and alumni at a handful of schools. But over time, as it has opened up to the world at large, it has also become more public. The motivation for this is simple: it will be impossible for Facebook to grow into the company it needs to be financially as a closed, private network. […]
    Patricio Robles
  • Eight cool social media infographics December 16, 2009
    The World Map of Social Networks   Building a Company with Social Media   Facebook vs. Twitter   Map of Online Communities (2007)   The Life Cycle of a Blog   The Conversation Prism   Gender Balance on Social Networking Sites Twitter Statistics This is only a selection of what's out there. What other social media infographics did I miss? Leave your comm […]
    Jake Hird

RSS Online PR

RSS PR Week Community