1) Ignore the ethics — should clients pay for what we do? And should we do stuff for clients that they don’t pay for?

2) Bring ethics back in — If we’re paying our staff to relay messages to their networks on behalf of our clients, what makes this different from spam?

You see? There were two parts. I was trying to point out that there is a benefit to the agency and the client in our staff tweeting about their campaigns — even if this is subsequently written off as a value-add or over-servicing, or simply ignored.

I think that paid stuff is open to abuse, too — although I’m pleased to say I’ve now got an ad.ly account, and could, in theory, pay high-follower-count twitterers like @KimKardashian to promote my shizzle.

I think that it’s absolutely fine for employees to choose to promote stuff to their networks, btw (w/ appropriate disclosure.) My point — which I also made in that post — is that employees must be left to manage their own social networks as they see fit. As their employers we should give them the training and tools they need to build their personal brands; but that this doesn’t give us the right to ask them to use their networks on our clients’ behalf.

In social media, transparency is key… So yes, to (client)

second thing: I always wonder about the profile side of things; I work with plenty of people that fully understand Twitter, Facebook alongside a myriad of other web tools both social and non-social (bla bla, all web is social). While their own personal profile may not be that huge, the work that they’ve done is visible all over the place.

I suppose my (almost entirely lost) point is that personal (and agency) branding is important but the dilemma comes in how this gives value to a client. If the work that you’re undertaking is of value then they should pay you for it, you’re adding value to their brand which is what they hired you for. The difficulty comes when you start to look at whether other people should be paid for adding value – If your message is reposted by someone far more influential than you (or your agency) then surely their input is worth more than yours – how do you then decide who gets the money? (obviously the agency that are hired do – but you see where I’m going with this).

http://andytson.com/blog/2010/01/minimous-posterous-minimalist-look-in-wordpress/

Thanks for the idea!

You know at the moment this post is the biggest source of traffic to the site. I need more visitors!

Hope you’re well.

Good luck with Rabbit!

I will have to try it out on one of my blogs.

I rarely read the forums but subscribe to the HPC blog. In fact I wrote about it here: http://www.prblogger.com/2007/07/human-content-aggregators/

Noticed you like Merryn Somerset-Webb. Same. Much better analyser of the market than that Allsop woman.

Either way, I think what you’re doing is great and I look forward to reading more of your blog posts.

PS: Fubra looks like an amazing company, it’s unfortunate my UK visa expires next month :(

Cheerio!