Good Or Bad? Sponsored Conversations…
I’m going to get all ’social media’ on you today. WAIT! WAIT! Come back!
First, check out this video. Consider it the starting point for the discussion.
I’ll meet you on the other side of it.
Not bad, right? Hardly painful at all. So, what’s the point? What Izea (who is, by the way, sponsoring this conversation) is saying is that it’s not a bad thing to pay people to spread the word in social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and so on. This kind of exposure, referred to as a sponsored conversation, is just word-of-mouth advertising.
The questions come into it, though, when you introduce compensation. If I say to you, without compensation, that XYZ makes a great widget, you can take that at face value. I have nothing to gain by it. But if the XYZ company pays me $100 to tell you that they make a great widget, then it becomes cloudy. You either trust my recommendation in spite of the money or you’ll write me off as a paid shill.
So is it good or bad? It’s all about authenticity and the ability of the person making the recommendation to be genuine. That can be accomplished most easily through open disclosure and judicious use of the recommendation. But if those are exercised in a succinct way, you can absolutely participate in sponsored conversations and not lose your soul.
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