How to make your social media outreach transparent

Posted on | June 19, 2010 |

It’s become a common tactic for marketers to send influential social media types free products, hoping they endorse the product on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and anywhere else online.

Perhaps consumers have become skeptical from seeing one too many upbeat tweets and blog posts from someone they’ve friended sharing their love for a brand or product.

The key to alleviating some of this skepticism is TRANSPARENCY.

Ensure you are following these three steps when using social media outreach:

1. It’s vital for marketers to ask the online influentials they’ve pitched to disclose when they’ve received product samples or any other incentive.
2. It’s also vital for marketers to disclose their relationship with people they’ve targeted to spark word of mouth online.
3. Honesty of the relationship between a business and a person is non-negotiable. It’s best to disclose relationships early and often in all social media venues.

On blogs, disclosure is easy. Bloggers simply need to clearly mention somewhere in a post that they were approached to write about a company’s product or service. Such a line could read, “I received [product name] from [company name] and here’s my opinion…”

On Twitter and Facebook, disclosure isn’t as easy due to space limitations. Using special hashtags is one way to disclose relationships. For example, #samp is being used by influential twitterers to denote when they’ve received a free sample from a company. Another disclosure tool gaining popularity is one of the six Twitter-friendly disclosure statements from cmp.ly.

Any other ideas for how social media outreach can be more TRANSPARENT?

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