Blog action day: iPhone an environment killer?

Ok ok, so I forgot I was suppose to blog about environment related issues on the 15th October… but it’s still 15th over at the US… so technically it still counts.

I just read an article at TechCrunch where “According to Greenpeace, the iPhone contains toxic brominated compounds (indicating the prescence of brominated flame retardants (BFRs)) and hazardous PVCs.”

Does this spell the death of the iPhone? I doubt so. Most electronic products are made up of non-biodegradable materials so they just sit in landfills when chucked away. But at least it’s creating awareness about electronic waste that most people aren’t aware about.

Another environment-related entry I posted earlier can be found here.

I’ll also be waiting to see how Apple will respond to this. Will Jobs be ready with another PR spiel?

Paid blogging (and how it may affect the PR pitch)

Recently I got to know of a friend who worked at a company that had just launched a new service. The company engaged the service of the controversial pay-to-blog company PayPerPost (PPP). How it works: You pay a pre-determined amount of money for XX number of blog posts. Bloggers in the PPP network blog about your product or service and received a percentage cut of the fee.

Because bloggers were not required to disclose the real nature of the sponsored post, it raised a storm of controversy and ethical concerns because article integrity were being compromised. For all you know, the next door teen queen/soccer mom/tech geek who raved about a certain product on their blog did so because they were paid to do so. PPP subsequently relented and later required bloggers to state upfront that they are paid to blog about a particular product or service. Still, it doesn’t take away the fact that it IS a paid review. You don’t have to be a marketing guru to know that most of the time, the review is skewed in favour of the product/service.

My friend had reservations about associating with such a controversial company but the boss adamantly pressed on with it. That aside, another problem is Google. One of the factors that affect a website’s Google page rank is the number of links to it. If there are alot of websites/blogs linking to your website/blog, you can be sure your website’s page rank will improve. The paid blog posts usually link to the website of the product/service reviewed. Google has a major issue with that, because it screws up the “real” ranking or organic search result of websites. Google is constantly fine-tuning their search algorithms to sniff out paid links; and sites that utilises paid links may end up getting *horrors* blacklisted on Google.

You are now probably asking “How does this affect pitching to bloggers?”. For one, if bloggers can be motivated by monetary incentive to blog about something (or anything), why in the world would they want to listen to your pitch? And companies, without the proper understanding of public relations and media impact, would have no problems bypassing the PR folks and going straight to PPP or the bloggers themselves.

Personally, I think it’s a bad idea. It just beats me why any self-respecting company or blogger would want to associate themselves with a controversial outfit like PPP.