The idea is tempting and you might just even get sold on it, if you are a newbie on social media marketing. You control the message. The bloggers are yours. Yet to the outside world, the effort is going to be seen as passionate fans of your brands/ organisation writing positive about your brand or organisation.

Clandestinely hiring people like this is also often perceived as one of the many shortcuts that companies can implement when they are faced with negative reviews, complaints, etc. on an online forum, where the hired bloggers can challenge the complaints and write positive comments to counter the negatives.

The option to neutralise negative criticism for an organisation without getting involved directly sounds good. There is no risk of flaring up criticism after a direct involvement.

The bloggers might already have established profiles and therefore the chances of their initiated discussions taking as normal customer reactions are high.

However, having said all this, we should not forget that one day people will find out what your organisation has been doing. For instance, one of the bloggers/ writers is not happy working with you anymore due to payments, working style, etc., and he decided to tip off some other blogger or newspaper.

Paying bloggers/ writers to write positive about you might not be an ethical way of dealing with your customers and other stakeholders, and in a way is cheating. One also needs to see the impact that it will have on the brand/ organisation when people actually finds out what has been happening. The damage such short cut methods can cause is too much to ignore.

Hiring bloggers, if at all, should be done transparently and people should be told what their roles are. However again, this could have its pros and cons, which we will discuss next time.

What do you say? Leave your comments.

Some time back, Twitter launched Twitter lists for its users. Now Twitter users can assemble other Twitter users that he/ she likes into groups and follow them. This I thought was a fantastic way for me to sort and follow people, if you are following a large number of people and you don’t want to use any third party apps.  For instance, I follow more than 11,000 people and used to have Tweetdeck to sort out users. Now I can do it directly on Twitter and also share the lists for other people.  I created a list of digital marketers in India to keep up with their tweets.

The possibilities are endless. There are many interesting lists already. One lists I found that could be very useful for PR professionals is this list of Indian journalists. Check it out.

Let us know if you found any other useful lists for PR professionals. By the way, you can follow India PR Blog on Twitter and here is also my Twitter profile.

Further reading on Twitter lists on Mashable here.

1. Monitoring mechanism: Have a listening capability and understanding what the various stakeholders are talking about our brands and organizations is critical. Without this, we would be just another me too and shooting in the dark. How do we build an effective monitoring mechanism in place. We can use blog search engines like Technorati and Google Blog Search to monitor the blogosphere, subscription on email and RSS on influential blogs around your industry/ subject, setting news alerts, and monitoring social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Digg, and social networking sites like Facebook, YouTube, etc. There are host of tools to monitor micro blogging platforms, read Twitter. For blog comments and monitoring the social media space in real time, we have free tools like Social Mention. What about the citizen journalism sites and consumer review sites. Lastly but not the least, not forgetting to monitor the search engines.

2. Being a part of the community and the dialogue: We have spokespersons of our organisations who would speak to the media whenever required. Is the same spokesperson going to be responsible for answering online queries, or is it going to be another person? The CEO of a large organisation might not always have the time. So is it the corporate communications person? Who is the online spokesperson, or the community manager from the organisation? Deciding this quickly and reaching out to influential bloggers and active social media participants and addressing their concerns is key.

3. Building your communities: By renting and/or creating social media properties -  renting as when we build our communities on relevant social networking sites like Facebook, Linkedin, and Orkut, micro blogging platforms like Twitter, media sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr; and creating blogs, forums, social networking platforms, applications and communities of users, and other properties.

4. Boosting visibility: Search engines are the encyclopedia of today. I remember a good example given by someone once that years ago, if we have to noticed something good, we would share it on our dining table or friends. Today, we would look it up online. Having your online gateway – your website, a easy to use and useful one, and maintaining good standards and optimization techniques to score well on search engines is must. Online advertising – Pay Per Click, Pay Per Action, Custom Payments – on social networks and blogs would give the boost.

What do you think? Leave your comments. Let’s discuss.