One of the ways we are able to bring you what you’ve come to expect from He Spoke Style is by partnering with brands we believe in to create amazing content. We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: we are extremely selective about the brands we work with, and retain editorial control of all content we publish across all of our platforms. In other words, no brand is going to push us around.
To that end, we do not publish stories written by brands, nor do we allow brands tell us how to write our content. As a result, we say “no” to a lot of offers. This is not the norm among websites like ours, but from the start we’ve applied the same high standards of quality to our collaborations as we do to all of our content.
How can I tell what is part of a paid collaboration?
Transparency matters. We feel very strongly about this. As a matter of fact, we’d consider “very strongly” to be something of an understatement. So, we have the following elements in place to make sure you can easily identify when content is part of a paid collaboration:
Collaborations on HeSpokeStyle.com are identified by:
– a “Collaborations” category displayed at the top of the story, in the left column, just above the social sharing icons
– Italicized copy at the beginning of the story stating that it is part of a collaboration, naming the brand partner, and linking to this page
– Inclusion in the “Collaborations” category within the site, available in the “Features” dropdown in the top navigation menu
– “Collaborations” in the left column to the left of the title in the homepage and category feeds
Collaborations on Social are identified by:
– #HSSPartner dedicated hashtag with brand partner tagged
– #sponsored hashtag on Instagram and #ad hashtag on Twitter
A Note on Social:
In the past we’ve only used the #sponsored and/or #ad hashtag and stated in the copy of a social post if it is a brand partnership. We’ve since added an additional hashtag, #HSSPartner, for consistency, clarity, and for our own tracking purposes.
