Forrester’s 2009 report about sponsored conversations defended pay-per-posts as a valid approach to drive buzz for companies.  The analysts define  sponsored conversations as:

A marketing technique in which marketers provide financial or material compensation to bloggers in exchange for their posting blog content about a brand.

Each blogger has an audience, the members of which implicitly trust the opinions of said blogger.  Put simply, if the blogger endorses a product or company, their audience will be more inclined to buy it.

Sponsored conversations accomplish a couple of things for your company:

1. They get to show the hands-on experience of using your product, which can’t be otherwise seen through advertising or in-store sales.
2. They widen your exposure for a relatively low investment.

The key to making the arrangement work for all parties is disclosure and authenticity on the part of the blogger and sponsoring company.  Bloggers should be allowed express their honest opinion, so there are some obvious risks.  For one, your whole plan could backfire if you get a negative review.  To be honest though, bloggers, by nature, tend to be genuine types of people, so they probably wouldn’t accept the assignment if they didn’t already have at least a neutral opinion about your brand or product.  The risk is there and it’s real so it’s good to plan ahead in the event such a scenario actually plays out.

I personally have reviewed everything from my delectable (no, really) Epson Workforce 600 to books. I find it’s a great way to engage with a brand and understand how it can help my audience.

So what do you think? Is your company embracing this new form of promotion? Will you start?  Let me know in the comments.

If your company has invested the time and/or money in social media monitoring, it’s important to make sure you’re tuned in to ALL the conversations that matter to you.  In our experience, this activity is often housed within marketing departments – and that probably makes sense since that group is generally responsible for all customer communications.  However, if you’re only monitoring brand and product, you may be missing a whole lot of other chatter that affects the business.

Social media monitoring can be used to inform loss prevention, corporate communications, employee relations, and public relations teams as well.  With this in mind, we’ve put together a list of categories you should consider creating monitoring terms for.  You should adapt this list to your particular business.

1. Company name
2. Company URL
3. Product names
4. Product URLs
5. Employee online activity
6. Employee professional and personal blogs
7. Public facing figures
8. Competitors
9. Industry websites/blogs
10. Relevant Wikipedia Entries
11. Third Party Influencers
12. Key Stakeholders

We don’t think this list is nearly complete, so if you have suggestions for adding to it, let us know in the comments.

I love it when I can bring my favorite things together — in this case tweeting and blogging.  Have my cake and eat it too?  Awesome!  The ideal scenario would be to use both channels in tandem to reciprocate interest in one another.

You should tweet to get readers, blog to get followers.  If your blog’s build using Wordpress, there are some especially nifty tools you can tap into.  The key to getting Twitter followers – I mean besides, of course, signing up for an account?  Make it easy for for people to follow you.

So keep doing what you’re already doing and incorporate just these 3 tips to get the momentum going:

How can they follow thee?  Let us count the ways:

1.  Add Twitter’s widget to your blog (the right rail is a great spot for it) – show your readers what they’re getting themselves into before they take flight.

2. Add a Follow Me button — Sometimes all you have to do is ask.  Add the request to all your posts and every page on your blog.  Your “profile” and “about us” pages are especially good spots.  Seriously, that little bird is soooo cute, who could say no?

3. Install the Twitter Tools plugin to sync up your activities across both channels.  With features like automatical tweeting of every new post and the ability to tweet from within your WP dashboard, this is a must-have!

Happy Tweeting!

Props to Jill and Kevin for infusing their own personalities into an ageless routine. It’s amazing what a little tweaking can do. They took something good and made it BETTER. What started as a treat for about 100 of their closest friends and family… the JK wedding entrance has accumulated over 1.6 Million views and 8K comments on YouTube in just 4 days. And this isn’t even the party — this is only the ceremony!

This video makes me want a wedding do-over.  It made my day. I think it’s probably making Chris Brown’s day too. ‘Forever’ is now No. 29 on iTunes, No. 28 on Amazon — and climbing fast! I’m totally diggin’ the red-headed usher… he can groove that aisle!

**Update: 3 hours after this post, YouTube views of the Wedding Dance were at 1.9MM and comments at 11.5K

**Update: 24 hours after this post (7/25/09), YouTube views of the Wedding Dance trippled to 4.4MM and comments also tripled to 22K. The video was featured on The TODAY show. ‘Forever’ is up to #3 on Amazon and #12 on iTunes.

I LOVE HootSuite!

Maybe I’m a productivity junkie, or obsessive compulsive, perhaps a little narcissistic… the truth is that HootSuite helps me get smart about using Twitter.  If you’re out to measure engagement, HootSuite provides the real-time data you need to figure out which of Tweets get the most traction.

No more tweeting in the blind.  From topic areas to timing and cadence, flight test the variables that affect your audience the most.  Especially useful for the newbie tweeter and folks running short on time, HootSuite provides instant feedback on clicks, lets you pre-schedule tweets and manage multiple Twitter profiles from one interface.

Add multiple users to your account and designate their access levels, monitor conversations using the search feature and even post directly from the web.

In a perfect world, I wish that HootSuite could integrate with my blog — that way new posts could go up automatically — what a time saver!  As it is, I’m relegated to using the bookmarklet (hootlet) to send tweets.  It also doesn’t track any clicks to links not created using the hootsuite hootlet.  So if you’ve got “Tweet this” buttons or some other twitter integration on your blog/site — there’s no way to track that activity.

Alas, the world of microblogging is still developing – HootSuite is definitely in a class by itself with a robust platform that’s user-friendly and FREE.

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