I officially have a serious case of blog envy.

Murphy-Goode, a winery based in Northern California, is seeking to hire an internet-savvy wine-lover to blog and tweet about their experiences in wine country for six months. The pay? $10,000 per month — that’s $60,000 total — plus free lodging in a private home nestled in the picturesque Sonoma County Wine Country. And did I mention tasting hundreds of wines every day for free?

Talk about a buzz. Already, the social media job search has generated a significant amount of promotion for the winery: 2,000 applicants, 900 posted videos, national media attention and a major jump in traffic to the company website. What’s more, these are just the preliminary results– the official launch of the actual campaign begins August 15.

The Murphy-Goode campaign has the potential to become a prime example of a company successfully harnessing the power of social media to promote a brand (although they too have already committed their own social media faux pas: Winery looks for a Sipper Who Twitters) But the Murphy-Goode blogging job also points to a controversial issue that has emerged in the world of social media: sponsored conversations.

Let’s face it– We’re not in social media 1.0 anymore. We’ve entered the days of professional company pages on Facebook and sponsored hash-tags on Twitter tweets. And the payola world of social media isn’t going away anytime soon. With the economy in the midst of a full-blown recession, sponsored blogging is a lucrative practice for both marketers and bloggers. Marketers utilize a cost-effective channel for generating buzz about a brand. Bloggers get paid to do what they do on a day-to-day basis in the first place.

But where does the general public — the readers — fit in?

Many might say that sponsored conversations put the reader in a disadvantaged position. After all, we’re more likely to be influenced by people we “know” than by a one-sided paid advertisement. However, I think the blogging audience also has a great deal of power in their court. They essentially determine the success of the blogger and marketer. What’s more, the blogosphere puts a microphone in everyone’s hands. Jeopardize the readers’ trust, and you’ll be sure to hear about it (and consequently lose your audience as well).

Jeremiah Owyang, an influential blogger and employee at media research giant Forrester Research, offers two basic rules for making sponsored conversations work for all involved parties (marketers, bloggers and readers): 1) Sponsorship transparency and 2) blogger authenticity. He writes:

“Sponsorship transparency means that both the marketer and the blogger must make it absolutely clear to the reader community that they are reading paid content- think of Google Adword’s ‘Sponsored Links.’ Blogger authenticity means that the blogger should have complete freedom to write in their own voice – even if the content that they write about the brand is negative.”

That being said, I still wonder how the art of sponsored conversations will play out over the next couple of years. Will the general public become jaded with the plethora of monetized blogs and turn a deaf ear to the practice? Or will sponsored blogging become a self-regulated marketing tool that still maintains an authentic voice? I think the answer largely depends on bloggers and marketers themselves, and how ethically they approach the practice.

How to Make Sponsored Conversations Work