Chris Abraham has a terrific post addressing this question over on Business 2 Community. Go read it.

As to the central question Chris poses: Blogger outreach is, hands down, earned media. Oh, and by the way: If you’re going to be doing outreach, do it right. Anti-Social Media has some good advice.

Takeaway for marketers: Sure, you can buy blogger coverage, but by doing so you’re effectively buying lousy ads; the best result of blogger outreach is unbiased positive coverage of your product or service.

Erik Sass over on MediaPost gives us 9 reasons why we should. I don’t know about you, but even though I believe in the principle of everything in moderation (even Facebook and Twitter), I find some of them pretty compelling.

(Hat tip to Barbara for the heads up on this one.)

I’m not sure which is nuttier: The idea that Facebook is pushing for a “like” to be considered free speech (All Facebook reports), or that someone would be fired from their job for liking a business on Facebook, even if that business is a competitor.

Takeaway for marketers: Anyone worth their social media salt is liking every imaginable competitor they can find on Facebook to see what they’re up to. Just sayin’.

You probably know that Mars rover Curiosity landed on the Red Planet this morning, but did you know that Curiosity has its own Twitter feed? (652,120 followers and counting.) Gotta love the way NASA is playing with this.

Thinking about advertising on Facebook? You might want to think again: According to one advertiser, 80 percent of the ad clicks are coming from bots. WordStream reports.

Takeaway for marketers: This is another reason why clicks really don’t matter. It’s all about performance. Getting a million clicks with zero sales is pretty worthless, isn’t it?