As social media continues to evolve, the lines between PR and advertising continue to blur to the point where social media marketing is considered a new form of free advertising on the web. Often users are seen as the free man power creating the new types of UGC driven marketing campaigns for billion dollar brands. [...]
At the beginning, there were TV commercials, interrupting our favorite shows for 30 seconds - the most intrusive forms of marketing imaginable.
Later, there were banners, the less intrusive form of marketing, because at least readers could disregard the screaming piece of graphic and try to focus on the content they wanted to consume. Of course, [...]
During the last two years of running a user generated site I’ve seen plenty of examples of brands hiding behind fake identities to create “presence” and push content. We do have plenty of sponsorship opportunities on MyItThings.com (fashion focused social network I run), which would be probably more appropriate for brands, but from some reason [...]