I was talking to a friend on the Third Tribe forums (disclosure: I’m a co-founder) about a sponsorship opportunity she had, and I gave her my advice for her specific circumstance (that’s the cool thing about over there: we do a lot of good one-on-one interaction in the forums). I realized that I have more to share here and so thought I’d give you some ideas about sponsors, audience, and your role as a content creator.

Sponsors Want Your Audience

First and foremost, if someone approaches you to sponsor your blog, your event, your whatever, what they’re saying is, “We’ll pay you in exchange for having access of some kind to your audience. They ultimately want to either a.) sell, or b.) show thought leadership in a space by connecting via your platform. More often than not, it’s A.

It’s up to you to help them achieve this goal. But of course, it’s also up to you to preserve your audience, and to not make them feel like you’re selling them to the highest bidder.

Your Audience Wants Good Content

Whether you’re a blogger, a conference, a TV show, or some other kind of media, the people you’ve gathered around you most often come to you for entertainment and education. If you’re Hanley Wood, you’re educating people in the building and construction world (for instance). You’re attracting contractors, builders, architects, and other related professionals to an event with information and opportunities that they won’t find elsewhere. If you’re [...]

Sun Mar 28, 2010 22:50 pm

It's an unfortunate fact that the speakers at some conferences can be self-serving; few people are going to go onstage and not promote their own company, never mind admit its faults.  However, when it comes to social media, it's hard to accuse the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania of bias, and so an OMS keynote on the subject run by two Wharton representatives was rather informative.

(Coverage of the Online Marketing Summit 2010 continues at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

Researchers at Wharton recently studied user-generated content and social networks.  Eric Bradlow, Vice-Dean and Director of the Wharton Doctoral Programs, and Steve Ennen, Director of the Wharton Interactive Media Initiative, then used the findings to create a presentation called "Wharton Dispels Myths of Social, Viral and Online Marketing through Cold Hard Research."

Here's one detail that shouldn't be buried: the academics agreed there's value in social media marketing.  They're not advocating that advertisers stay away from Facebook, Twitter, and the like.

Indeed, a main point the two men made was that social media behavior can be indicative of buying behavior.  Put another way, this means that heavy social network users are often also heavy buyers.  And this correlation opens the door to an effective - if sneaky - marketing tactic, since businesses can give a lower price to their first customer and then exploit their second customer.

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Sat Feb 27, 2010 16:30 pm

Soon, you will be able to share your location with your Facebook friends. According to the New York Times' Nick Bilton, Facebook plans to reveal this new feature during its f8 developer conference at the end of April. As Bilton notes, Facebook updated its privacy policy last year to incorporate language about location sharing. Facebook, according to this report, has been working on this feature for over a year. The company will offer location-based services through its own mobile applications and developers will be able to use this data to develop their own location-based apps on top of a new Facebook location API.

Sponsor

How Will Facebook's Users React?

It will be interesting to see how Facebook's users - who are famously averse to change - will react to the arrival of location as a status update on the service. According to Bilton, Facebook "has been trying to figure out how to add location data to its service without raising potential privacy concerns or negative feedback from its users, as it has in the past with new features and redesigns."