Last week the Canadian business magazine entitled, appropriately, Canadian Business posted a brief blog on their website entitled “How Giving Freebies To Bloggers Can Backfire.”

It’s a short read, and I don’t want to steal their thunder.

However, for the too long/didn’t read crowd I’ll summarize: giving free products to bloggers doesn’t guarantee that they’re going to write nice things about your company.

Shut the front door!

At the risk of being mean spirited, this is one of those tidbits of information that may be a moment of cosmic awakening for someone somewhere, while the rest of us are over here rolling our eyes.

Such profound obviousness usually only comes from studies funded by a grant from The Government of Canada’s Ministry Of Redundancy and Pointing Out The Obvious/Le Ministère de Redondance et Faisant Remarquer L’évident du Canada.*

As a tech blogger and sometimes product reviewer I should feel grateful that over the years I’ve never been given a cringe-inducing product by a vendor and their PR people.

Especially when you consider that as a manufacturer’s rep I have been given cringe-inducing products by the vendors I’m supposed to represent. But that’s entirely a whole other blog post.

Back on track here, I have occasionally received products from PR pros that I thought could be improved on, and I’ve always given that honest feedback privately, or in my review or both. Vendors and their PR pros should consider reviewers a form of beta testing.

In other words, don’t be shy about sending things my way that you’d like both feedback and promotion on.

*yes, all the signs on our government buildings really do look like that here in Canada.