Lisa Whelan has a nice post on her 5 Deadly Sins of Social Media. It's a nicely put together post, I'll comment on one of her points:
Lisa said:
Opaque Marketing: Marketers are becoming more sophisticated about the ways that they use social media to their advantage. It is already difficult to avoid pop-ups and other advertisements on-line. And, with some social media sites, it difficult to tell what is advertising versus what is genuine, unbiased opinion. Take, for example, bloggers who get paid by companies to evangelize products (I don’t, but a lot do). Advertising on social media sites isn’t nearly as transparent as it should be, and social media runs the risk of being tarnished by overzealous marketers.
This relates to my last two posts nicely and is a good launch for something I wanted to put in the previous post.
Social Media and the Naked Conversation may actually obscure marketing in many instances. In The Naked Conversation, Scoble and Israel discuss how - through conversation and blogging - marketing will become more honest. It will do this because conversation allows query / response interactions or even outrage / response interactions. Either way, people talk to each other and it's a two-way exchange.
At Gray Hill Solutions, we are involved in a venture between us and two other companies. We are the scrappy smaller company, the other two are much larger and have longer histories in the transportation industry.
We have started a web site for this new venture. Of course I included a blog. I have had a stunning lack of success at getting the traffic engineers and hardware manufacturers with whom we are partnered to contribute to the blog.
Because they don't like to do marketing, or if they do like marketing they don't see how the blog fits in. I gave them the whole schpiel about naked conversations and social media, and they understand the theory - but can't place themselves in the execution.
They still consider it marketing and want to write only about the product.
Lately I've been wondering, though, are they still right even if they don't just write about the product? If your sole purpose in participating in the conversation is to drive people toward buying your product ... does this taint the text you type?
Certainly, you'd be less likely to blog elements that would devalue your product.
And then, what if your blog was merely used to discuss things with your users? Does this make the blog a social-media 800-number-equivalent ombudsman? That doesn't make for interesting reading.
So how would companies successfully blog? Opaque marketing, by way of bias or content selection, would discredit most corporate blogs. Then you'd have to filter down, which means influencing the Don Dodges or Matt Cutts or even Dion Hinchcliffes of the world. (well, Dion would influence himself ..)
Or through intermediaries like PayPerPost, directly influencing the topics of bloggers and basing their pay on the content of the article.
Social Media can guard against this by strength through numbers. But that means we, as part of social media, need to be vigilant. The conversation can maintain its status as a debunking engine only if people maintain a variety of information sources. And that gets harder every day.
One thing is sure, social media's bout with spam is just beginning.
Blogged from the Sai Oak in Ocean Shores, Washington
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