Plogs: channelized shovel marketing from Amazon

Tom Moertel — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 21:26:00 -0500

Recently I visited Amazon.com and was assaulted by a fat stream of marketing blurbs. Amazon tried to convince me that I was actually enjoying an innovative blog written by my favorite authors, each trying to “connect” with me, but I found the attempt to be shallow and annoying. To me, it was still a fat stream of marketing blurbs.

And what do the marketing wizards at Amazon call this blurb stream? Your Plog.

Amazon explains it like this:

Your Plog. Your Amazon.com Plog is a personalized web log that appears on your customer home page. Every person’s Plog is different (hence the name) and just like a blog, your Plog is sorted in reverse chronological order. Each post also gives you the opportunity to provide feedback to the sender as to whether you liked the post or not. This feedback loop means your Plog becomes even more relevant and interesting over time. Your Plog will appear if you are logged into our web site and is visible only to you.

I explain it like this:

Your Plog. Amazon.com thinks you want your time and attention delivered to every guy who wrote a book that you somehow indicated interest in. You don’t. Your favorite authors already have blogs, and you already subscribe to the ones you care about. As a result, Your Plog contains nothing but stuff you don’t care about and stuff you might have cared about, had you not read it five times already from other sources. It is an annoying waste of your time and attention, foisted on you by the ravenous marketing weasels at Amazon.com.

For example, whenever the Pragmatic guys come out with a new book on Ruby or Rails, I hear about it from Andy Hunt’s blog, Dave Thomas’s blog, the Riding Rails blog, emails from Andy, ruby-talk postings from Dave, and now – thanks to “my” Plog – Amazon’s home page. (In fact, my Plog contains no fewer than three blurbs from the Pragmatic guys – all stuff I have seen before. I like the Pragmatic Programmers and think Andy and Dave are good guys, but I don’t see what they gain by being associated with Amazon’s Plog-based marketing.)

Other takes on the Plog

Here’s what other people are writing about Plogs. From Changing Way:

When I go to amazon.com these days, I’m shown a “plog.” What does this ugly term mean? It told that it denotes a weblog personalized to me. What it turns out to be is a blog by someone I bought a book from years ago. I’ve nothing against this person or her book. Neither do I think that her blog is bad. It’s just not of interest to me, and so doesn’t belong on Amazon’s home page, or on my “personalized” version of it.

From FactoryCity comes a post entitled Ohmifrog, Amazon, cut it out!

And here’s my gripe: a “plog™” – if that’s really the best you could come up with – and if it’s supposed to inherit anything from its “blog” heritage – should be about original authorship, not about having other people’s content thrown at you.

Amy Gahran has a more analytical consideration of Plogs in Amazon ‘Plogs’ – What Do You Think?:

I think the idea of plogs may have great potential for relationship-building, if implemented carefully and with an eye toward timeliness and relevance. But frankly, this Amazon implementation feels off-base to me so far…. Well, [an author’s participating in Plogging] could be terrific or terrible, depending on the content quality and relevance [of the author’s contributions].

Bingo. That’s why Amazon’s Plog concept will remain more annoying than useful. Authors do not want Amazon to own what they consider to be their conversations, and thus the Plog will be used as little more than a marketing mailing list.

Authors do not want Amazon to own the conversation

It’s the quality of the conversation that counts, and smart authors will not want their conversations to be confined to Amazon. Instead, they will set up their own sites where they can have greater freedom and greater control. That’s where the authors will open themselves to honest conversation, and that’s where the best stuff will occur.

Amazon’s Plogs will get the scraps – bits of the real conversation that have been converted into marketing blurbs and pushed down the Plog channel. In fact, it already seems to be going that way: a lot of “posts” in my Plog appear to have been recycled from real blogs or web sites.

Amazon, count me out

Even though my immediate reaction to discovering “my” Plog was mild disgust, I did try to give it a chance. After having given it a week to grow on me, I am convinced that I want nothing to do with my Plog. It wastes my time and attention and gives me little in return.

Did Amazon Plog you yet? If so, what do you think?

"Plogs: channelized shovel marketing from Amazon" by genevieve

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 20:33:53 -0500

Hello, Tom. I have just discovered Amazon Daily (which the plog thing morphed into during 2007, apparently) and really appreciate your rant for its timely assessment of how this tool was first implemented – clumsily, it sounds. Very useful as I may write an article or at least a blog post on author publicity sometime soon, including book trailers (which I am not a big fan of). Thanks for preserving your outrage.

"Plogs: channelized shovel marketing from Amazon" by Timothy Fish

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 15:42:11 -0400

As an Amazon customer, I have mixed opinions about the concept, but as an author I think it is great. If an Amazon customer happens to purchase one of my books because it is combined with another one on for a discount, he may not care enough to subscribe to my RSS feed, but he may be interested enough to look at my next book if I can tell him about it through Amazon.com. If he is not, he may be mildly irritated but that does not bother me because he was not going to buy the book anyway. I have nothing to lose by using the service.

Tom Moertel's Weblog: Plogs: channelized shovel marketing from Amazon

Plogs: channelized shovel marketing from Amazon

Other takes on the Plog

Authors do not want Amazon to own the conversation

Amazon, count me out

"Plogs: channelized shovel marketing from Amazon" by genevieve

"Plogs: channelized shovel marketing from Amazon" by Timothy Fish