Amazon Web Developer Blog Actually A Recruiting Tool
from the nice-try dept
theodp writes "From Amazon, the people who brought you 'faux' recommendations to promote apparel, comes the 'faux' personal blog to promote employee recruiting. A weblog that appeared recently on Amazon's site, "Ted's Life at Amazon.com," contained posts in which a Web developer identified only by his first name told what it's like to work for the company. "It's nice to work for a company that saves pennies so they add up on the bottom line," Ted fondly wrote before disappearing. "Without going into whether the content is factually accurate or not, what I can tell you is that it was not an individual's personal blog. It was a recruiting message that we put in the form of a blog to experiment," an Amazon spokesman said." Considering the blog world loves to rave on and on about how they can sniff out a fake, this one seemed to slip under the radar - and I saw it mentioned a few times in articles about the rise of "business blogs". I'm sure we're going to see plenty more "fake" employee blogs in the future as PR people try to make sense of this whole blogging thing. You would think that, maybe (just maybe), someone within Amazon would point out that it was a bad idea to fake a blog.
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And there's no way to tell without some diligent digging which most people don't have time to do (even those who aren't just sheep).
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