I woke up cranky today, so I decided to pick a fight with my buddy and colleague Robert Loch over at MarketingFix over Dr. Pepper's attempt to bribe webloggers to stimulate a viral marketing campaign for its new site RagingCow.com and a related new product line. Since I'm not posting here as often enough these days, I figured I'd link to our debate (click this link and scroll down for the comments section).

To a large extent, I am playing devil's advocate, taking a stance giving Dr. Pepper the benefit of the doubt in this campaign. Yes, it is a fairly blunt approach to fly a bunch of teenage bloggers to a schmooze fest in an effort to get links. But then, as I point out in my comments on MarketingFix, Microsoft has recently done pretty much the same thing, and a bunch of reputable bloggers have taken them up on junkets, so I'd say the jury is still out on whether PR whoring to bloggers is an effective approach or not.

We all know that weblogs are going to have a role in marketing and communications. I think it's still too early to tell what shape(s) that is going to take.
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