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Companies increasingly use part-timers to take care of their online marketing, some paying active Internet users to promote their products on the web through planted consumer reviews on dedicated sites or other more or less clandestine puffs.
¡ß Who spends how much and how?
It is unclear how much companies spend on online part-time marketing as they typically keep the activity itself a secret. But proxy marketing agencies are believed to take up 5-10 percent of a company's Internet advertising cost.
Firms hire part-timers to promote their product and services as much as possible in a limited time. Pay varies according to different responsibilities and how well they write product evaluations. Cho Jin, a director at marketing agency Bridge Laboratory, says the pay varies from a few dollars to thousands.
Industry insiders say typical part-timers are those hired to post online comments to news articles and in online communities. They usually work on a monthly pay of W1-1.5 million (US$1=W1,044) and sign a confidentiality agreement. Through online postings, they introduce certain goods and point out problems with rival products. A group of five or six is mobilized for any one project, usually for three to four months. Each person posts around 30 messages daily or as many as 1,000 a month. The commissioned marketing agency oversees the effort and gets W10-20 million a month.
PureM president Park Myung-soo says online posting is the easiest way to spread the word and has been popular for several years. ¡°But if it becomes known to the public, it can undermine corporate image,¡± he added. Last year, some movies including ¡°The Perfect Couple¡± were blasted by netizens who claimed part-timers had been hired for promotion.
¡ß An evolving discipline
Businesses are developing more advanced methods. They may for example secretly sponsor popular bloggers and product critics as exclusive marketers. This is because consumers find the detailed product evaluations offered on blogs more reliable than one-line comments. These professional part-timers are mostly devoted bloggers who favor certain businesses, and they operate on incentives. They are paid W100,000-200,000 per entry, with additional pay in line with page view and citation frequency. The cozy relationship with their sponsor remains a secret for fear of triggering ethical controversy.
Such sponsorship is a sweet lure to successful bloggers who get over 100,000 visits to their sites per day. One blogger says there's no reason to refuse the offer as they are only getting paid for something they write anyway. He speaks of bloggers earning W2 million or, in rare cases, W10 million a month by operating several blogs.
According to Whang Sang-min, a psychology professor at Yonsei University, the job is actually done by a small portion of net users with vocal power. ¡°If they¡¯re sponsored by firms, they can sway public opinion in the wrong direction, and of course when the murky relationship comes to light, it can trigger an uproar in cyberspace,¡± he adds.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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