I Will Blog for Shwag

As a blogger, I have never even considered threatening someone with a bad review of their product in order to get free stuff. Apparently this happened at the Blogher conference, a convention of "mommy bloggers."

I’m sitting in the lobby of the Sheraton – where I spent much of my time. I was just hanging out, doing some work, and talking to the people who were coming up to me. Okay – I’ll be honest, I was talking to people and playing the “Tiles” game on Microsoft Surface because, (expletive deleted), that is possibly the most addicting game ever. Anyway, it was about mid-afternoon when someone came up to me. I’ll call her generic mommyblogger because I couldn’t pick her out of a lineup if I tried.

“Are you the Crocs guy?” she asks, timidly.

I look up and smile. After all, it’s nice to be recognize and it’s a sign that I’m doing my job right.

“Yes, I am.”

We continue with small talk. She says her name but, while I probably caught it at the time, it slipped out of my memory as the events of the next couple moments transpired. She asked how I was doing at BlogHer. If I was having fun. How it felt to be one of the only men there – all those typical questions that were being asked of me. Then her demeanor changed completely. She mentioned how she didn’t get any shoes at the SocialLuxe lounge. I apologized, saying that we provided what we could but it’s hard because we didn’t know everyone’s shoe size. She nodded but I could tell that wasn’t the answer she wanted to hear. Then she says something that I couldn’t believe.

“Ya know, if you don’t give me shoes – I could totally write something bad about you on my blog.”

“Excuse me?” I asked – hoping she would laugh or give me some indication that she was just joking around. Nope…

“It’s just a pair of shoes. It’s a lot easier to give them to me than deal with the negative press I could make.” (From No Sense of Time, via Consumerist.)

At first I read that and thought, wow that is really lame. But then I thought, hey! Why doesn't anyone gift me with free stuff to review for my blog? Aren't my 2000-odd pageviews per month worth some free books?

OK, they totally aren't. Nevermind.