Month: June 2007

USphere meets TechCrunch

Glad to see a member of my blogroll, USphere, get a nice writeup on TechCrunch on Tuesday. (Actually it wasn’t the blog on my blogroll that got the writeup, but the startup company of the same name.)

As TechCrunch puts it:

Usphere lets students fill out a single application and be considered by their network of colleges. When you’ve completed the application, it’s tossed into their applicant search engine and only accessible by the 33 schools in their network. If a school likes you, they email you an acceptance letter complete with a bottom line price tag to attend. The application service costs $65, although they have several free college search tools.

Interesting timing, in light of what U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has been saying about the need to simplify the “Byzantine” financial aid application process.

Spellings criticized the cumbersome federal financial aid application process, calling it “redundant, confusing, Byzantine and broken … a maze of 60 Web sites, dozens of toll-free numbers and 17 different programs.”

Maybe USphere can try to help Secretary Spellings develop the killer financial aid app app.

You can trust us; we’re bloggers, not journalists or marketers

Online readers trust bloggers more than they do journalists, the mainstream media or traditional marketers, according to this Advertising Age article.

One of the big reasons blogs have such impact is their credibility among readers. In a February poll from We Media and Zogby Interactive, 72% of adults said they were dissatisfied with the quality of American journalism today. Another 55% said bloggers are important to the future of American journalism, and 74% said citizen journalism will play a vital role, according to the poll.

Consumers are also taking bloggers’ word before they buy. A late 2006 Ipsos MORI survey found that blogs were a more trusted source of information than advertising or e-mail marketing. One-third of respondents said they had decided not to buy a product after reading a negative blog post, while 52% were persuaded to buy after reading a positive review.

Ad Age also links to an interesting demographic profile (PDF) of bloggers that should help advertisers hone their pitches to us. For instance, 59 percent of us floss daily and 63 percent never go to church.

Story via AdPulp (here).