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I want to follow up on yesterday’s post about SocialSpark 2.0 and the concerns about direct publishing. I recognize that this is a major change and with all change comes concern, but I would like step back for a moment so everyone can evaluate this change in context.

The Big Picture

Social Media Apps Are Interconnected

Your Flickr is tied to Facebook. Your Facebook is tied to Foursquare. Your Sponsored Tweets is tied to Twitter. Publishing between social applications is commonplace. We aren’t asking you to do anything that most of you aren’t already doing with other applications. We are just giving you a way to earn money too : )

Your Trust is at Stake

We recognize that by authorizing SocialSpark to publish to your blog you have granted us access to a personal and valuable asset. We take that trust very seriously and recognize you can revoke that trust at any time. We will never publish anything that you have not personally written and approved. We know that doing so would destroy our relationship with you and that is the last thing we want.

An Easy Work Around

If you have any concern about providing us with access to your blog we suggest that you create a new user account just for us. You can always delete that account and we will no longer have access to your blog. If you are on Blogger we use OAuth to connect to your blog. At any time you can revoke access with the click on a button.

Why We Are Doing This

FTC Compliance

The FTC Guidelines that went in to effect last year have raised great concern for advertisers. They are concerned about disclosure. They are concerned about the legitimacy of claims made by bloggers. Simply put they want to see posts before they go live. The more comfortable we can make advertisers (and their legal departments) the more Opportunities there will be for all participants.

Flexibility

Many advertisers need to launch campaigns within a given time frame. Unfortunately that doesn’t always work with our blogger’s schedules and that causes two problems:

  1. Bloggers miss out on good Opportunities
  2. Advertisers can’t fill their campaigns

This new system will allow us to release opportunities early, let as many people participate as possible, then release the posts within the advertisers campaign window. Don’t worry, you will always know when the post is scheduled to go live.

Blogger Protection

We have had issues in the past were advertisers rejected posts after they were already live, sometimes for reasons we can’t understand. This causes dismay for bloggers and a logistical nightmare for us. We want to create a system that guarantees payment if a post is made.

This Is The Future

Our goal is to create the highest quality, most efficient marketplaces for social media sponsorship. I hope you can get comfortable with direct publishing, it is a big part of our SocialSpark gameplan and will allow us to create a more prosperous future for our bloggers. I love you guys. I don’t want to lose any of you… but it is time for change.

This is a big leap for us too! Let’s go for it together.