Recently there has been a lot of buzz on the blogosphere whether bloggers should be paid for coverage after it had emerged that a few bloggers were offered money by a PR agency in exchange for shining some positive light on their social media campaign.

Here at Brando Social we believe in a mutual relationship with our team of bloggers. Key in these relationships is to provide each blogger with creative, relevant content to share with their peers or their communities. We never try to target bloggers at random since this wouldn’t be any different from actually spamming them. This formula enables us to “pay” our bloggers with high quality content rather than with real currency. Again, incentives do not have to be monetary.

In our daily work we deal with people who are passionate about something, this might be a product, a brand or an initiative. It’s this passion we are trying to harness and it works quite simple: Someone who loves your message will pass it on (for free). Again, mutual trust is key, not just between you and your blogger, but also between the blogger and his peers. We believe that involving money can break this trust. In the worst case this will either result in negative PR for us or our client or it will cause our blogger to lose their audience. “Bought” opinions always come with a certain amount of bias and that’s where the whole construct clashes with our values we hold so dear, honesty and openness. Once your online reputation is damaged it’s very difficult to get it fixed; unlike offline reputation, which can fade with time, online reputation will always stay on the Internet and there is not a lot we can do to save it. If you like, see the Internet as a massive eternal storage.

Safeguarding credibility is very important in social media & PR alike. We’ll be always judged by our actions, therefore anyone overly endorsing one brand or product would be soon exposed as an advertiser rather than advocate.

Paying for coverage is something we do not advocate, and quite frankly, if you are creative in your approach you should never be forced to go down that route in the first place.

We’d like to hear your stance on this topic. Does the end justify the means?