Umbria Connect gathers input from publicly available CGM sources to locate individual bloggers writing about topics or themes of interest to marketers. Umbria then sells the blog URLs in blocks of 25 on a subscription basis--with either monthly or quarterly updates.
Then I found this press release on Umbria Connect from PRWeb via Political FunnyBone (but not before getting some nasty evil splog I won't link to)....More U.C. details:
"Umbria Connect is a natural extension of our blogosphere segmentation capabilities," said Janet Eden-Harris, CEO, Umbria Inc. "This new offering enables us to support our clients close the loop on the blogosphere research and put the analysis to work in their individual outreach campaigns."
But what about informing people that their urls are being sold out for marketing purposes?
What sticks out to me as very weird and kind of against the way things go out here is Umbria then sells the blog URLs in blocks of 25 on a subscription basis--with either monthly or quarterly updates.
Okay...it's bad enough that our mailing addys are sent to whomever will pay for them. And it's so bad for our teleophone numbers that we had to start a National Do Not Call list.
But *selling* our URLs??
Okay, maybe it's only going to be the URLs of "influential" bloggers, and the rest of us schmoes are out in the cold...
but still...Umbria is selling our urls! not their service! Which means we may be dealing with more spam than we already get.
IMHO, this is NOT how social media works and could ultimately black-eye a company that misuses Umbria's info. It could also open the door to other kinds of rip-off,splog-related efforts.
But, even more, I didn't think our urls were the same as our telephone numbers or our mailing addresses.
Now, I may feel a bit for companies that don't want to invest in an in-house person for finding blogs, but this just doesn't feel any more right than Pay Per Post.
All I know is lots of folks just might end up feeling a lot spammier in the near future...
Just a thought.
Update: Shel Holtz offers his insightful $.02on the matter.
Blogging, Blog, Blogs, marketing
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