Paid brand conversations on the rise: transparency is a myth, money makes the social media world go round

Money A study from PQ Media has found that more brands are likely to compensate bloggers and social media users in an attempt to generate chatter about their products. The press release about the report doesn’t really say if in these practices clear and obvious links between the posts/tweets/whatever and the advertisers exist for the people who take the effort to tweet, buzz, share, bookmark, retweet, like or simply ‘read’ them.

Maybe the report tells more about it, but I don’t really feel like paying $1,295 to find out and I guess the relationships between the ‘social influencers’ and the brands that reward them are not always clear since PQ Media uses the word ‘controversial’. And, let’s face it, we all know business is business. 

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Thoughts on anonymous blogging, personal branding and social media marketing noise

Blog My little blog has a nice crew of contributors. Some contribute a lot, many do it for the fun and passion of sharing, some do it a while (I guess until their Pagerank is up or they seek incoming links somewhere else), some do it now and then and some allow me to take what I like from their blogs.

There are all kinds of people, all kinds of reasons to do things and they are all welcome.

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