Engagement/Free Marketing example

As suggested by Professor Brown I researched engagement marketing to try to find examples. I had a small idea of what it actually was and I found that it is basically a new form of marketing in which you get the consumers involved. It is more of a two-way system instead of the traditional one-way method. Companies utilize techniques to encourage the consumer to contribute and form a community of interested consumers in things like company blogs and chat rooms. I found a very interesting website related to this which shows a negative side of free marketing or engagement marketing for consumers. The website is called Blogsvertise. This website pays bloggers to positively talk about products and services of participating websites. Simply mentioning the product in your blog can earn you money through pay pal because it give them publicity and exposure from the "consumer" who people look more favorably to when considering purchasing a product. This seems very wrong to me. This idea basically is to manipulate the public's attitudes. Whether the blogger likes the product or not they talk highly about it. I think this is actually quite unethical. Consumers usually trust the other consumers more than the companies selling the product because the consider other consumers to be honest. This site makes me think that almost no opinions can be trusted anymore because they may be speaking on behalf of the company or website in their favor. They realize that word of mouth Marketing and two-way Marketing are more effective, but they are taking it too far and taking advantage of that which I think is very deceitful.