Forrester Says Paying Bloggers is OK Provided There are Disclosures

Forrester Research is out with a new brief this morning by analysts Sean Corcoran, Jeremiah Owyang and Josh Bernoff that says that sponsored conversations on blogs - akin to what how Chris Brogan partnered with KMart - are going to become more commonplace. Further, they recommend the tactic provided that there are clear disclosures all around.

Sponsored posts are nothing new. Although the tactic always raises a fair amount of controversy. Daring Fireball, one of the most popular Mac blogs, regularly runs sponsored posts inside its feed. Techmeme has them on the site too. However, where these are different is that they act more like advertorials. Where it gets prickly is when bloggers themselves write about their personal experience with a product (usually balanced) in exchanged for compensation.

Forrester makes five recommendations in the brief: mandate disclosure, ensure freedom of authenticity, partner with relevant blogs, don't talk and walk away. All good advice. Further, as you can see from the chart below they sit sponsored conversations somewhere between advertising and PR in the matrix.

Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

The report misses something, however. This is nothing new. Magazines have run advertorials for years. And radio stations run promotions where the DJ gets involved. What is new is that on many of these sites the editor and publisher are the same individual. There are no hard church/state boundaries as there are with other media.

The way to get around this is to write and submit your own content as a sponsored post. Have the blogger run the copy but with an advertorial label. This has worked in magazines for years. 

Further, I would suggest working with an organization that represents bloggers and has experience running such programs - such as Federated Media. In addition, sponsored conversations work best when you integrate tactics across the spectrum that Forrester has here. Sometimes, earning media can lead to additional opportunities to get to know the personalities behind a blog and then additional opps. down the road.

However, on the whole, I agree that we're going to see more of this in the future. I am hopeful that everyone, publishers and sponsors, will bring their ethical A-game.

links for 2009-03-02

• 
  
  Putting a Bolder Face on Google - Biography - NYTimes.com
  
  
  Great profile of Marissa Mayer and her role at Google.
  
  
  (tags: google marissamayer profiles search)
  
  
• 
  
  Digital Shops Begin to Feel the Effects of the Economy
  
  
  Mostly display is getting hit.
  
  
  (tags: digitalmarketing advertising trends economy recession)
  
  
• 
  
  Instapaper Kindle Edition
  
  
  Coming soon...
  
  
  (tags: instapaper kindle amazon)
  
  

Secure Your Twitter Sessions with https

Want to catch up on your Twitter fix but don't care to have your employer listening in on what your reading? Or maybe you're using an open wifi connection at an airport and and don't care to risk people sniffing your session. 

Well, I am not sure when they started this (it might be old), but Twitter, like Friendfeed and others, supports https. This means you can post/read tweets as well as replies, direct messages and even search the user directory all securely via an encrypted session.

All you need to do is visit https://twitter.com instead of http://twitter.com and you're good to go. This is particularly valuable for people who don't share their updates with the world, just their followers. Lifehacker explains the benefits of using https here.

Social Media in Sixty Seconds

Michael Brito, a social media strategist at Intel, has done probably the best job to date explaining what social media is about - basic common sense. It's about being human. This short video, all of one minute and 12 seconds, stars Michael's daughters and it tells you all you need to know. Kudos to Michael.

Ads in Google News Turn it into a PR Playground

The Google News team blogs that contextual ads are now running alongside of news search results...

"What this means is that when you enter a query like iPhone or Kindle into the Google News search box, you'll see text ads alongside your News search results--similar to what you see on regular Google searches or Google Book Search."

Read between the lines and guess what that really means: Google News is now a PR playground. Given the relative ease of launching a simple Google Adwords campaign we're going to see a lot of companies - some legit, others not - buying up real estate on Google News solely for influence, not clicks. Google may bounce these ads if they don't perform - time will tell.

It's already happening. Here's a case in point. Last week an eagle-eyed reader alerted SEO blogger Barry Schwartz that one advertiser tried to use Google News sponsored links as a way spread fake news - in this case a false rumor that President Obama was killed. The ad, Schwartz notes, was pulled down. But you can bet there will be more. And clearly some people saw it.

On the whole, I am bullish about ads in Google News. The PR industry largely missed the first search engine marketing wave and I believe that, at least when it comes to smaller campaigns, we still have time to catch up. Richard Edelman, our CEO, is also thinking the same way (see point #3). For more, see this post from my colleague, Marhsall Manson, on how good SEO is an outcome of good PR. Ads on Google News will serve as just another log on the fire that will encourage PR pros to boost their search knowledge. 
However, the ethics issues around contextual news ads and search overall are huge, particularly on sites like Google News. It will fascinating to see what Google deems as kosher/not - and to what degree people in PR and outside may try to push the boundaries.