Desperation at SezWho? Partners with Izea, Entrecard, and Creative Weblogging
In a slew of press releases today, the commenting and profile company SezWho has announced partnerships with social marketing company Izea, blog widget advertising network Entrecard, and blog network Creative Weblogging. SezWho is under a lot of stress from Disqus and Intense Debate and this round of partnerships with relatively small and, in the case of Izea, dodgy companies makes this seem like a somewhat desperate move.
Izea
Izea, formerly known as PayPerPost, has a pretty sketchy history, but also a lot of users. Izea is a "social media marketing" company that pays bloggers small amounts of money for posting blog posts about Izea's advertisers. Izea's PayPerPost product especially came under heavy fire from bloggers in its early days, as it didn't require disclosure of the advertising content from its bloggers and was generally seen as misleading. Even today, there are still questions about Izea's disclosure policy.
SezWho is going to work with Izea's SocialSpark, a marketplace and community which connects advertisers with bloggers who are willing to write sponsored posts. SocialSpark will start using SezWho to provide its users with a way of tracking blog comments and reputation.
Given that Google has already banned all PayPerPost users by indexing them with a Pagerank of zero, it seems Izea is interested in creating a different ratings system for its users by leveraging SezWho's technology.
Entrecard
Entrecard provides bloggers with a blog-to-blog advertising widget and will give SezWho users who receive ratings of 4 stars or more with credits to advertise on its network of blogs. This is an interesting approach, as it connects reputation with a direct reward. Through this deal, Entrecard will get a stronger foothold among bloggers who are already working with SezWho and probably hopes that SezWho's users will return to actually buy real advertising after having tried out the free ads.
Creative Weblogging
SezWho's deal with Creative Weblogging, an international blog network, is probably the most straightforward of these announcements. Creative Weblogging will enable SezWho's technology among its network of blogs. SezWho advertises that it can greatly increase the number of comments on blogs. This is something the Creative Weblogging network could definitely use, as most of its blogs are currently getting close to zero comments on average.
SezWho
Overall, this is an interesting, yet somewhat desperate, move by SezWho. In terms of publicity, it has been in the shadow of similar ventures like Disqus and Intense Debate. By adding a number of more formal and visible partners, SezWho looks like it is trying to gain back a bit of mind share among publishers.
At the same time, though, at least two of the partners they have chosen, Izea and Creative Weblogging, don't exactly have great reputations. Izea has a history of deceptive advertising and a lot of content on Creative Weblogging looks rather spammy, too (though there are also a few good blogs in the network as well). Entrecard, while an interesting service, is also mostly a niche player, which will probably get a lot more out of this partnership than SezWho itself.
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I tried SezWho a while back and found that it did not work as expected and would not even put out my picture on my comments. I then tried Disqus and have been with them ever since with no complaints whatsoever. Have read about Intense Debate, but never got around to them since I have been quite happy with Disqus.
I'd just like to clarify the bit about Entrecard.
Entrecard is now active on over 14,000 quality-screened blogs, meaning you can buy advertising on all these blogs with our virtual currency. It is this same currency, Entrecard Credits, that we are issuing people when they comment. There are no "real ads" or "free ads", just ads purchased with our virtual currency.
That being said, our objective in the partnership was to increase the quality of traffic from the Entrecard system, and convert at least half of it to commenting traffic. We facilitate millions of blogger-to-blogger visits every day, and this was a move to get those millions of visitors commenting more, increasing the quality of traffic for all.
Can never hurt to drive traffic to your site!!! Hope it pans out.
Not all IZEA/PayPerPost users were "banned" from Google. There were a few people who took a PR hit, well most people, but things have calmed down around that and PR has come up and come back for many people. IZEA is doing a very good thing here and yet naysayers continue to knock it down.
The partnership with Entrecard and SezWho is a perfect compliment. I applaud these companies for working together.
Frederic,
I am baffled by your take on this.
What makes you think SezWho is "under a lot of stress from Disqus and Intense Debate"?? SezWho is successfully building a social service that provides content discovery based on people and social rating / reputation capabilities. Unlike Disqus and Intense Debate we are not a comment replacement system. We augment social media sites with additional functionality. Furthermore, we are not just about comments. Our service also applies to forums, wikis, etc. - anywhere there is user generated content. We are by no means "desparate". In fact we believe that these partnerships and the several others to be announced bring tremendous value not only to the partners but also the contributors and readers of social media sites.
tedd@sezwho.com
Fredric.
Jitendra from SezWho here.
Having more user than Disqus and ID combined does not sound desperate to me.
Also building great partnerships like Izea, Creative and EC that provide mutual value to all parties is a sign of growing business...
-Jitendra
jitendra@sezwho.com
Congrats to SezWho on the multiple partnership announcements!
Of the partnerships listed, I have some insight on SocialSpark synergy because I'm a blogger, advertiser and investor there. SezWho's focus on reputation tracking is a perfect fit and reinforces SocialSpark's gold-standard code of ethics (100% in-post disclosure, transparency, opinions, and GOOG-friendly).
SezWho's model of enhancing a content/comment system, rather than replacing it off-site should pay dividends long-term. The global conversation has migrated from blogs, to social networks, to microblogging, to aggregation services and I believe will come full circle back to blogs as more services like SezWho, friendfeed and others empower publishers to bring the conversation back to its source.
I only wish I wasn't already conflicted so I had a shot at the iPod contest ;-) http://sezwho.com/contest_ss.php
I thoroughly support Frederic's post. It seems that Disqus has gotten uptake from most of the blog community, and so this move makes it seem like SezWho is buying users. So it seems desparate to me. Frankly it doesn't surprise me that SezWho has more users than the other two if they've partnered with thousands of Izea's spam blogs. Quantity yes, quality?
I'm sorry but I do not support any company that "partners" with Izea. That company is a blight on the blogosphere.
Richard,
The one thing that isn't getting the balanced perspective is that there are two other alliances in this story that are completely glossed over because of the Izea focus.
SezWho is an impartial service. The ability to unite conversations and aggregate reputations and expertise, provides value to all networks, regardless of how you feel about Izea.
SezWho has users that have come well before the Izea relatioship as all there relationships are just getting announced. SezWho works with any online content where conversations and community are part of the engagement and dynamic.
Thanks, Jitendra
Frederic/Richard,
We'll be the first to acknowledge that disclosure policies and practices across all marketing can stand to improve. We've taken the lead with both PayPerPost and SocialSpark to set new disclosure standards and are working with industry groups to help address the multitude of marketing applications that exist and continue to evolve.
As far as creating a rating system to help evaluate blogs for sponsorship value (vs. search engine value), we have already introduced IZEARanks. We've openly published this ranking system based on actual pageviews (10% weighting), uniques (70%), and active links (20%) and are always open to feedback. We also welcome third parties who can help provide relevant metrics and create more transparency in the ad marketplace. SezWho does just that -- they provide great insights into UGC that can be useful to our users, bloggers, and advertisers as they evaluate sponsorship opportunities.
SocialSpark is a completely opt-in marketplace. With the information we provide, Advertisers have the option to hand-pick bloggers and bloggers can accept/reject sponsorship opportunities as they choose.
"Blight on the blogosphere"?... Did you mean that when you sold us our sponsorship on RRW? :-)
Ooops typo...(Trying hard to keep up with all the positive buzz we are creating today :-))
I meant, SezWho has users that have come well before the EntreCard, Izea and Creative relationships as all these three relationships are just getting announced and started.
David, that was certainly a mistake on my part to sell you a sponsorship for one month -- especially as you publicly exposed the data from that ad campaign without my consent, and without telling me that's what you planned to do with it. Frankly I found out then what a dishonest and dirty company Izea is and I swore never to make the same mistake again.
Jitendra, I have no doubt that SezWho is a reputable company and your product is fine. I don't think you should be making deals with companies like Izea, but that's just MHO.
Richard,
I don't see how publishing the data that we collected with our own tools makes us "dishonest" or "dirty." We were completely open with the comparison of both campaigns, publishing our own numbers (that weren't particularly great) along side yours. I also alerted you to fact it was published. Since when does transparency, openness and sharing equate to dirty?
We have gone to great lengths to expose as much information as possible to our advertisers and deliver the best ROI we can. Perhaps you should focus on the same.
OK this is now way off topic, but since it's been brought up...
Ted, you used data *I* sent you, as part of an advertising relationship. You had no right to publish that data.
And you "alerted [me] to fact it was published" *after* you published it.
To claim that was "transparency, openness and sharing" is a joke. You published private business data that I sent you, without my knowledge or agreement. And your post about it was slanted towards your own pay-for-post products, which distorted the data in my view.
As I said, I regret doing business with you people and I've learned a lesson.
And for the record, it was 1 month's advertising and it was for a stats product Izea had released, not one of their pay-for-post products. But still, in hindsight it was a bad idea for me to do that deal, so definitely a mistake on my behalf.
@Ted & @Richard: I think there's an easy solution to your misunderstanding. Richard, just tell Ted the piece of "private business data" you believe he published in his ROI case study and could have only gotten from you. If he can't show how he got his data elsewhere, I'm sure he'd apologize. If he can show his data source is not you, I'm sure you'd apologize. No need to hold grudges about something so easy to solve with communication. I understand it would deflate an entertaining discussion, but you guys wanna give it a try?
STUMBLED!
I think this partnership can only help bloggers, this made me install SezWho and hopefully I will see the benefits.
The partnership rocks! :) thanks for this graham. this is very helpful to us bloggers. I really like the concept of commenting and points,makes more people want to comment, which is good for bloggers.
i've posted my thoughts on your post frederic - click my name to read them.
Personally, I don't see SezWho being desperate because they offer a different service than Disqus and IntenseDebate. SezWho works for wikis, forums, etc. not just for blogs.
IMO, they are better off exploiting Community Forums and Wikis than Bloggers ;) But that's just me.
very positive review on the entrecard and SezWho partnership, would it be possible to quote you and add it on my blog post re this development?
good wishes,
pete
Not sure about Izea, but I respect Richard's views.
As for EC, I concluded that it's a fake credits motivated traffic that only beginners might be happy with. In long term it appears that people only visit blogs because of the credits they get. They simply leave in seconds.
Definitely not recommending it for bloggers who respect themselves.
With this partnership, don't think the things will change much. It's just another way the droppers could get more credits. The party who benefits is the one who's 'dropping', and not the one writing great content, and that's very important.
Off-topic but just to comment on Tom's entry, there are so many blogs using Entrecard that while they suffer from so-called drop-and-run techinques still benefit from Entrecard when writing quality posts. Your premise is that the whole lot of Entrecard dropppers are of the drop-and-run kind, but that's generalization and does not reflect another group who are in niche blogs that discover each other and become regular readers. I have increased my subscriber base, while not in the thousands, is still a happy place than when I was working independently trying to promote my site one blog comment at a time. What does qualify for "fake credit"? Credit is as credit does. When an EC dropper puts in time and effort to earn credits so they can advertise on other blogs, isn't it legitimate credit? While there are undoubtedly dubious bloggers in any community like Izea, Entrecard and a host of other social networking communities, these companies still offer a certain degree of benefit to its members. It's not their place to be editors of the blogosphere but, and hopefully I am correct, I think that they're trying to create a community that would [eventually] weed out leeches.