« Sponsored conversations - good or bad? »

I recently listened to one of the most fascinating podcasts I have heard in a long time.

The podcast was from The Social Mediasphere where they had a great illustrious panel consisting of Sean Corcoran from Forrester Research, Marshall Kirkpatrick of Read Write Web and Ted Murphy of IZEA and Wendy Piersall of Sparkplugging, all talking about whether 'sponsored conversations' should be allowed or not. This is an old podcast, but is still a relevant and hot topic even today.

For those that have not heard the term 'sponsored conversations' before, Forrester Research defines it as:

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

Click to download the entire independent report by Forrester Research.

The podcast is 90mins long, but I highly recommend you pour yourself a glass of wine and sit back and listen to the whole show, but for those that cannot spare the time, let me provide the highlights for you with a little flavouring of me added in.

Marshall’s standpoint was he didn’t agree with "paying people to put words in someone’s mouth", and I have to say I can understand where he is coming from. If we take an A-list blogger who has a loyal following, and Apple approach them to write a review on the new iPad and tell them that they can be as honest as they like in their post and once finished they can keep the iPad, surely this 'payment' is going to influence their review? If a poor review is written, Apple are unlikely to use them again.

There was also a lot of talk that providing 'full disclosure' to your readers when a post is a true post or a 'sponsored conversation' is acceptable behaviour, but I do wonder where this full disclosure takes place – at the bottom in small print maybe?

However a good point was made by Sean, "how is this any different from a resort paying someone to fly over to write a review on their hotel?"

I very rarely sit on the fence, but this debate had some very good and compelling arguments on both sides. However, in the current climate it is hard to argue against anyone wanting to be paid for doing something they are good at, but it will ultimately be down to the readers to determine the authenticity of their posts and whether they will remain loyal followers.

I came across this video on YouTube from IZEA called The Caveman's Guide to Sponsored Conversations and whilst informative it is also a little humourous. Had to share it.