Product testing/website reviews on blogs

Hi guys,

I am about to start product and website testing with some of the 15k+ bloggers in my social network (fuelmyblog). The rules are simple, the blog needs to be a member of the community (we manually approve/reject each new blog so the community is spam and porn free) and have signed up to product testing. They will receive the opportunity and choose whether to accept. We'll then send the site to test or send out the product in the post, we'll even be sending bloggers to restaurants/hotels to review. We want only true reviews ie good or bad and of course a link or two to the site or company - I must stress this, we only want to see true reviews of products or services not paid posts.

I wondered whether you think this is a good or bad idea, the bloggers are keen to get started and I am simply looking for some feedback from a marketing/PR angle.

Thanks

 

how do you know which of the 15k bloggers are trustworthy enough to do this?

 

Great question.

Firstly, we humanly review each blog that joins up. We don't accept spam, porn etc and - importantly - we do not allow blogs with less than x number of posts. That x changes dependent on the quality of the posts. We then monitor the blogs content and our user base flag up any problematic blogs.

If we are sending a product to test, we'll need a postal address, not PO Box, a real address - depending on the quality of the blog post and review (not having to be positive just quality) the blogger will be entitled to bigger and better products as the trust level grows - which will be measured by a points system.

And of course, we have many users that interact on the site/blog everyday and they already have won many prizes so we have a trust level with them. An example was when we gave 100 users snorg Tshirts to keep, most wrote a blog post, they weren't asked to but they were all regular users.

Thanks, sorry for the lengthy reply