This week in our Social Media and PR class we discussed the topic of ethical blogging. After our little debate the essential element of maintaining an ethical position as a blogger became apparent. Once the confusion settled our class generally agreed on the fact that, in order to receive compensation for ones blogging efforts, a certain level of transparency must be present.
This "level of transparency" is referring to the practice of making sure your readers understand the motives behind the author. Therefore from an ethical point of view, if an outside entity was to offer a blogger a "gift" or some other type of compensation for a positive review, the author or webmaster of the weblog should make it known to the readers that they are being compensated.
So, if you ever find yourself in a position like this remember to let your readers know that the idea of writing about a company or product came to you because you are being compensated for telling your readers about it.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
The Compensated One Percenters are the Professional Citizen Marketers...
An unpaid "One Percenter" is someone that we thank everyday for the time that they spent contributing to websites such as Wikipedia. These people are among the one percent of the users that visit these sites who actually contribute to the highly sought after content. Everyone should try and add a little bit of data to the web in order to balance out all of the information that we, the users, have absorbed for free.
"One percenters" however, are not just the one rangers who contribute to the various non-profit online communities. They are also the people who maintain a social website of ther own, like blogs, forums, video blogs, and the other forms of social media on the web. Surprisingly a large number of these "One perceneters" have already began to generate an income by simply creating a blog and putting a few tasteful advertisements along side their "precious" information. I heard somewhere that 1% of the U.S. population controls nearly 90% of the money. If this is true then possibly it is the "One percenters" that control 90% of the content on the internet. In college these past few years I have been told many times that my generation will be the pioneers of the "Information Age" and that our knowledge will become one of our most coveted commodities.
Well newsflash people! We are here, in the information age, and yes there are tons of people that are simply making money online by getting paid for the information that they have contributed to their personal social medium. Name a topic and you will find a blog. And, right along side the article that the users have been searching for you will find a nicely placed advertisement for a product that is related to prevalent keywords in the article.
A large portion of these websites are simply profit seeking entrepreneurs that have meticulously created a platform for their users to interact with the other surfers. Oftentimes the profit generating methods of these companies are unseen to the untrained eye or simply overlooked by the general population of internet surfers. For example our class has decided to use blogger.com as our platform for creating our social media and PR blogs. Although It doesn't appear that blogger uses any type of advertisements or revenue generating methods, the fact is, that for every new blog that is created by a user, Google has just created another potential client for their "adsense" program. The more websites with "Adsense" means that more people will be able to click on the advertisements paid for by the Google "Adwords" advertisers. Blogger.com is part of the Google network, this is why it is so easy to ad the "adsense" page element into any blog at blogger.com.
So... spend some time contributing to wikipedia and the other free social information resources. But, when it comes down to it ask yourself one question. "Do you want to be paid for your knowledge? Or give it away?" Either way the user gets their information for free and a product suggestion, you get compensated for being a citizen marketer.
"One percenters" however, are not just the one rangers who contribute to the various non-profit online communities. They are also the people who maintain a social website of ther own, like blogs, forums, video blogs, and the other forms of social media on the web. Surprisingly a large number of these "One perceneters" have already began to generate an income by simply creating a blog and putting a few tasteful advertisements along side their "precious" information. I heard somewhere that 1% of the U.S. population controls nearly 90% of the money. If this is true then possibly it is the "One percenters" that control 90% of the content on the internet. In college these past few years I have been told many times that my generation will be the pioneers of the "Information Age" and that our knowledge will become one of our most coveted commodities.
Well newsflash people! We are here, in the information age, and yes there are tons of people that are simply making money online by getting paid for the information that they have contributed to their personal social medium. Name a topic and you will find a blog. And, right along side the article that the users have been searching for you will find a nicely placed advertisement for a product that is related to prevalent keywords in the article.
A large portion of these websites are simply profit seeking entrepreneurs that have meticulously created a platform for their users to interact with the other surfers. Oftentimes the profit generating methods of these companies are unseen to the untrained eye or simply overlooked by the general population of internet surfers. For example our class has decided to use blogger.com as our platform for creating our social media and PR blogs. Although It doesn't appear that blogger uses any type of advertisements or revenue generating methods, the fact is, that for every new blog that is created by a user, Google has just created another potential client for their "adsense" program. The more websites with "Adsense" means that more people will be able to click on the advertisements paid for by the Google "Adwords" advertisers. Blogger.com is part of the Google network, this is why it is so easy to ad the "adsense" page element into any blog at blogger.com.
So... spend some time contributing to wikipedia and the other free social information resources. But, when it comes down to it ask yourself one question. "Do you want to be paid for your knowledge? Or give it away?" Either way the user gets their information for free and a product suggestion, you get compensated for being a citizen marketer.
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