I was intrigued by the following post from Peter Kim’s Reputation Matters. At its core the post makes sense indicating that your online conduct, who you associate yourself with and how you engage in those relationships have a strong bearing on your credibility. I agree that your number of followers is not a correct measure of your credibility but the quality of the relationships you’ve built with your network.

The quote that caught my attention from Peter Kim’s post was: “Thus we require personal interactions to help bridge the trust gap. These consist of content and quality within direct conversation. Recency and frequency matter here which should temper the “monetary”/intangible risk of any action. Behavior bundles in here as well.” In a space where relationships have been traditionally built through honest and authentic interactions, this should ideally be the norm. But we have to realize that this space is changing everyday. Marketers are starting to see the true value of social media and the wealth of brand conversations and opportunities to engage with customers will set the ground for another wave of change.

This leads me to Peter’s response to sponsored posts in which he said, “I believe that monetization leads to loss of objectivity sooner or later.” He referenced David Charbuck’s post entitled “Shooting Fish: Blog Sluts”. I read David’s post and I think he has polarized the view of bloggers. It’s nice to idealize a world where writers/bloggers have integrity and do not, in any way, prostitute themselves for the almighty dollar. The reality is that it happens with the emergence of the blogs. Everyone has forever been trying to figure out the monetization of new media and inevitably 100 ideas will unfold and a handful will be tried. Writing used to be a profession, a craft that required strong skills that were honed overtime. Today’s reality is that everybody and his brother can easily create a blog and can, with the plethora of social tools, spread their own messages to the world. That being said, Social Media 101 has provided some rules about acceptable behaviour.

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What a classic case of the power of social media. HP, like Dell, has truly embraced the influencers in social media program to help them spread the word about the HP Dragon Notebook: 31 influencers to give away 31 notebooks in 31 days. What a unique and insightful way to not only maximize reach, but introduce Hewlett Packard to the social arena in a very positive way.  Here’s one of the chosen influencers, Chris Pirillo and his campaign to give away the HP Dragon.

If you type in “hp dragon” in search, you’ll notice that only the social media sites are the top ranked search results. The reason that this is important is now HP has built a positive influence within the social sphere and has garnered incremental influencer attention, who want to partner with them on future initiatives.

At Ammomarketing, we understand the importance of developing influencer relationships are very much with the intention of creating long-term partnerships with strong value exchange between the company and the influencers. Overtime, this value exchange turns into a trusting exchange that’s mutually reciprocated and can yield optimum benefits for both parties. Canadian clients are beginning to see the value of social media as a cost-effective way to strengthen brand perception, drive reach and create enduring and positive brand conversations. Good for you HP!

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

I had the distinct opportunity to attend the Rotman Lecture series to watch an insightful presentation by Rahaf Harfoush, a key member of Barack Obama’s Campaign that helped reshape the way political campaigns are run. Ideally, the voice of the people should be represented, and to garner their support means listening to their concerns and persuading them that you will answer those concerns. The Obama Campaign took it one step further: It harnessed this support by arming people with tools to help spread the message and making them feel integral to the campaign. This popular armament provided incredible individual empowerment that caused an explosion of smaller campaigns that fueled the Obama fire.

The Campaign unleashed its brand to the masses and the public embraced it and made it stronger. A great example of this is the Yes We Can Video by Little Will.i.am, an initiative developed by supporters who took Obama’s message, made it their own, and spread the word. It became synonymous with the Campaign and eventually amassed over 14.5 MM views.

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