Social Media Marketing Dude

I call the act of a company that hires a person or a company to blog on their behalf “Shadow Blogging”. A part of reputation management is damage control for sure, answering posts in a positive way or even posting to educate people about a new service. Where do we draw the line in ethics? That is a question that will need to be answered. 

There has always been a controversy about the separation of content and advertising, yet in online advertising “advertorials” are very acceptable. Pay Per Post, which was a great way of building reputation, recently required their affiliate bloggers to adhere to a disclosure policy. And then there was the WalMart blog scandal.The question of ethics really comes in when you are posting positive comments about a company’s service in forums and blogs. With reputation management you look for positive comments, negative comments and no comments and then post accordingly.

But, if you believe that the service provided by your customer is great, and then is it really unethical to let people know about it and get paid to do so?

I would love to hear from other people that deal in Social Media? Comment away! 

Share This

A study conducted by Wharton uncovers the behavior of “network neighbors” within existing customer bases. Mining data from “social networks” — who talks to whom or who emails whom — could allow companies to pinpoint likely customers who otherwise would be overlooked.

Hill, Foster Provost of NYU’s Stern School and Chris Volinsky of AT&T Labs Research detail their findings in a paper titled, “Network-Based Marketing: Identifying Likely Adopters via Consumer Networks,” published in May 2006 in the Journal of Statistical Science. “One of the main concerns for any firm is when, how and to whom they should market their products,” the authors write. “We provide strong evidence that whether and how well a consumer is linked to existing customers is a powerful characteristic on which to base direct marketing decisions.

Our results indicate that a firm can benefit from the use of social networks to predict the likelihood of purchasing.”   While the paper is more targeted at how academic departments can take advantage of social media marketing, the study does prove quite a few things that businesses can use for a proof of concept when pitching Social Media Marketing to their companies. 

 Read the Full Story at Wharton
The full paper, “Network-Based Marketing: Identifying Likely Adopters via Consumer Networks“  

Share This