In light of the FTC’s recent scrutiny of Social Media practices and the activity that connects brands to influencers and ultimately consumers, we will soon see guidelines and corresponding penalties to serve as governance for future engagement.
In the realm of sponsored posts or tweets, the FTC simply cannot delineate the differences between earned and paid postings and therefore assumes that most consumers are equally oblivious.
With Izea’s impending announcement of a new pay-per-tweet network, combined with existing ad networks and services such as TweetROI, Twittad, and Magpie, the FTC will be forced to pay attention to the paid endorsements in one of Social Media’s most promising and also elusive networks.
As you could possibly imagine, the reality of mass-sponsored tweets will raise a Tweetstorm that will immediately trigger a blogstorm, which will ultimately escalate into a full-blown Category 5 media hurricane. But the reality is, whether you agree with them or not, sponsored conversations and paid tweets are already here. The question is how to use them correctly and responsibly.
Their appeal to marketers is obvious. They increase awareness, expand networks, drive sales, build communities, promote causes, raise money and awareness, and push traffic.
So, before the chaos and confusion ensues, I wanted to take a proactive role in steering a productive conversation to explore and introduce solutions, ethics, standards, and also reduce the possibility for consumer confusion and potential backlash.
I hosted a virtual summit on the topic via Facebook and invited pundits and industry leaders to discuss:
- The issues and options for meeting FTC guidelines
- The responsibility of brands and participants to provide consumers with information, context and intent
- The inevitable need for guidelines and standardization in disclosure practices
- The impact on the image of the sponsoring brand as well as the brands of the influential voices who lease their stature and social graph and how it ultimately affects the dynamic, trust, and vibrancy of their community
Disclosure certainly is a first step, but it can also steer perception, which is why this discussion is so critical to the evolution of sponsored conversations. The debate however, centralizes on the mechanisms and terminology for disclosure and whether or not they are effective when either explicit or implicit in nature.
To kick things off, I introduced options for consideration such as including a symbol or term in each Tweet that conveyed sponsorship or endorsement such “$,” “spon,” “paid,” “endorsement,” “sponsored” or possibly including an is.gd or bit.ly link to a landing page that could more effectively communicate the nature of the endorsement, ad, promotion, and the intention of the relationship.
As the conversation deepened, the rationale for one standard or solution unlocked a series of challenges that necessitated further exploration and discussion. As I noted in the forum, the use of “paid” for example, precipitates psychological connotations that will evoke a completely different emotional response as compared to endorsement or sponsorship.
Anders Abrahamsson shared an interesting perspective, “Paid is coming close to that you sold out your integrity – some might call it prostitution.” Stowe Boyd, the champion for Microsyntax.org, offered a general resolution that resonated with many participants, “My recommendation would be to concoct a new indicator, perhaps ‘AD’, to place at the start of any sponsored Tweet. This has several benefits since anyone would immediately know, at the outset of reading the tweet, that it is sponsored. It stands apart from the tags, which usually appear in a cluster at the end. Also, this would make it easy for tools to build filters to block ADs or to easily find them, depending on your leanings.”
I believe there’s a difference however, between sponsored and paid tweets, one defined by purpose and objective. For example, I enjoy the tweets published by Gary Vaynerchuk and I observe that he has a tremendous following of developing wine (and marketing) enthusiasts. A company may choose to either sponsor his Twitter wallpaper and/or his tweet stream. In this case, they don’t necessarily influence his tweets, they simply sponsor them. This introduces another alternative through the disclosure of relationships directly on Twitter backgrounds.
However, if I pay for tweets specifically, then I expect to dictate the content related to each paid tweet. Brian Carter of TweetROI shared his perspective on sponsored conversations versus ads, “SP and AD make sense. Surprisingly, even some quality Twitterers, don’t want to change the advertiser’s text…Everyone interprets payment/ sponsorship differently….”
At this point, SP and AD become potential preambles for sponsored and paid tweets respectively.
But, Jeremiah Owyang, social analyst with Forrester Research, believes that they are not enough, “People won’t understand that ‘AD’ and ‘SP’ imply that those tweets are paid for. We need to be explicit, even if it occupies more characters in the tweet. The only solution is to specifically state, ‘sponsored’ in each…”
Again, I suggested that an included (shortened) URL that directs to a pre-defined page that explains the sponsorship and further clarifies the intentions and benefits of the program is another option to consider. While it’s implicit in nature, it communicates disclosure in a mutually beneficial way that serves the Twitterer, the brand, and the reader.
In the leaked Twitter documents, also know as Twittergate,, there is mention that Twitter is already thinking about this as a form of revenue generation.
It appears as though Twitter is considering the implementation of color coding or introduction of different fonts for sponsored and paid tweets. James Eliason of Twittad believes that Twitter should release an API to support color-coding as not only a form of disclosure, but also as a measure of preventing spam.
Eliason took the case to Twitter co-founder Evan Williams where he recommended that Twitter begin the process of selecting specific ad partner providers to prevent dilution from spam marketers and ensure that the advertising comes from the source through the API. His idea is to assign the API calls from each ad partner through Twitter.com and also third party apps such as TweetDeck, Seesmic, and PeopleBrowsr. He also believes this will introduce a new subscription model for users to pay a small fee for a non-ad model across all platforms.
Our challenge isn’t only to unite the industry of sponsored conversation providers around common standards and ethics, we must also encourage marketers to put them into practice.
Whether it’s on Twitter, in blog posts, or in television commercials, paid tweets are technically no different than the array of commercials and advertisements that are available to marketers already – except that everyday people become the spokespeople and thus become difficult for followers to discern real experiences versus influenced perspectives.
While everyone agrees on the need for standards, and it’s clear that competitors will actually collaborate to help define them, there’s merit and promise in top-down regulation from the FTC and/or Twitter itself. In the meantime, I still believe that including “sponsored” as Jeremiah suggests, providing disclosure on individual wallpaper, or including a link to a page that offers context and clarity, represent credible alternatives in the interim.
The #Spon & #paid tweets suck a lot and recently some twitter contests did take over the Twitter Trends
I was an early user of some of the networks tat you alluded to here and have steadily seen a decline in revenue from using them. I have already stopped using them since the majority of my followers do not want to see ads any longer and many have DM’d me to please stop.
And with Izea jumping in now, it is totally going to turn twitter into nothing more than an ad channel
Great post Brian. As I stated in your Facebook discussion IZEA fully supports clear, mandated disclosure.
We are nearing the official release of http://sptwt.com and I welcome feedback from tweeters, advertisers and readers on our platforms automated disclosure system when it is unveiled.
That said I believe disclosure is only one part of the equation. If you want to truly legitimize the space must have both disclosure and transparency of identity.
I look forward to demonstrating our solution to you.
What is your response to those who may contend that this idea delegitimizes the unpaid favorable opinion?
The only way that could happen is if all people became skeptical of all favorable opinions. People already go to hotel review sites and think the good ones might have been written by the hotel owner and staff. I don’t think this will change people’s level of skepticism. I read the content and look for marks of honesty in the words, and I also am affected by how well I know the person and my perception of their level of honesty and integrity.
The cynic in me says this will take care of itself as a wave of ads will drive real people off Twitter. That being said, standards are necessary. This is a really thorough post about an important subject. As a marketer, I would tell a client to sponsor rather than advertise. Sponsors are appreciated, while advertisers are disliked. Which would you like for your brand. Unless you are offering a time-sensitive thing like “free fries with a burger” today or “$5k off the first 500 Fords we sell today.”
That is more like sales, and if you don’t like the product and never intend to buy it, you don’t have to follow it.
More complex than I thought, Brian. Glad you are thinking about this and not me:-) tweet me when you have it solved!
Do you think “a wave of ads will drive real people off twitter” or do you think it will just drive the “real” followers off the bot profiles?
I’m selective about whom I follow in the first place, and would unfollow people that obnoxiously saleseweeting.
i envision twitter turning into primarily two groups… real users following other real users and ‘bots following ‘bots.
Scott, I think there’s a middle path between those two extremes. My vision for TweetROI was that people would tweet about stuff they already liked but get paid for it. People can also go check out a website for the first time and decide if they like it- they can get paid to say something positive, or choose not to tweet about it, or tweet something negative which might be rejected by the marketer. We’ve seen some fairly influential people come into TweetROI who are very authentic and personal in their tweets- I think people will just get used to seeing the occasional paid tweet.
Fascinating post/discussion on the implications of the FTC proposed guidelines. IZEA and others are treading on thin ice. If the FTC is looking at “mommy bloggers”, you can bet they have IZEA and others in their gunsights.
Your post offers some interesting ideas on the right way to alert your followers that they are reading something sponsored.
James, IZEA is in full support of the FTC guidelines on disclosure.
http://izea.com...e-requirements/
I have personally met with the team at the FTC (http://bit.ly/SDX6C) who are drafting these guidelines and discussed our ideas for Universal Disclosure.
http://izea.com...sal-disclosure/
What the overwhelming majority of people fail to recognize is the FTC Guidelines deal largely with soft-money incentives that happen outside of a platform. Platforms like ours can and do systematically enforce standardized disclosure. However, PR Firms, Brands and Social Media Consultants many times don’t enforce disclosure and have no standard methods of enforcing or auditing it.
The FTC is clear that value is value. Whether you give someone a video game, pay them $50 or give them a cut for each sale as an affiliate it all needs to be disclosed. This means big changes for a lot of firms who have been operating stealth campaigns.
The proposed FTC guidelines will be a wonderful thing for our company. We have invested millions of dollars building systems that allow us to systematically enforce and audit disclosure for large scale campaigns.
I don’t disagree with the need for disclosure, Ted, but:
a) The FTC doesn’t have to be the one to regulate and enforce it. The MPAA has demonstrated that it’s perfectly possible for an industry to regulate itself.
b) I think when considering disclosure requirements, some thought should be given to the scope of the decisions which it affects. In the case of, say, the SEC regulating public companies, you’re talking about institutions investing millions, even billions of dollars in companies on the basis of the disclosed information. How much risk is there really in someone saying “I’m chilling with a Diet Pepsi” and not disclosing that Pepsi sent them a free 12-pack?
c) I think this is the most important to me — the idea of embedding disclosures in each and every tweet seems just completely ludicrous to me.
Much of the appeal of Twitter is its simplicity as a conversational tool. Forcing all kinds of meta-information into the conversational datastream isn’t the solution. We simply don’t have to shove “this is an ad” in everyone’s face, any more than they should have to flash a “paid placement” notice in movies & TV every time there’s a product placement.
If you’re going to require disclosure, rather than mandating specific implementations, make it something like “disclosure must be placed where a reasonable person could find it if they were interested”. Then if Twitter would just implement linkable text in profiles, people who are being sponsored/paid could simply link to a disclosure page from their Twitter profile.
Thanks for taking on this topic, Brian.
For direct sponsored links, adding a “sponsored” pre-tag would be a very good start. Twitterers can then either engage, ignore, or unfollow accordingly, depending on their tolerance for paid ads.
The other area that we would want to look at is the commission-based tweet via affiliate links. Prepending these tweets with “affiliate” would work.
When I see any link to Amazon I assume there’s a very good chance that it’s an affiliate link. But when it’s a shortened link to someone’s paid online seminar, for example, there it no way to know that it’s an affiliate link.
I have strong feelings on affiliate links but I won’t go there….right now.
I find all of this to be quite comical. Seth Godin after all once wrote a book entitled, “All Marketers are Liars”.
To act like this is “new” is just plain silly, new form yes, new? No.
Consumers are smart enough to know the difference, this regulation is the advertising industry spending money lobbying to create laws solely to decrease the rate of it’s waning monopoly power in what is becoming a content economy. Can we stop pretending that it’s something more than that?
The US is having a hard time with regulation, first Amazon, state taxes and affiliates, now disclosure. It is very different in the UK. Mainstream publishers like Hearst Digital aren’t disclosing commercial links in editorial, see Scoble’s Cosmopolitan demo here
http://friendfe...inks-uk-startup
Advertisers realise it’s better not to control content. From Skimlinks Joe Stepniewski
‘My recommendation would be to try to use text based affiliate links that are inline and relevant to your content – affiliate marketers agree they are the most effective, as readers perceive them more as editorial and less as advertisements’
Funny, my “background” poll eralier today http://bit.ly/55ME7 was a harbinger of TechCrunch’s post on this very topic. Based on my own ambitions and the early results of my poll, I’m weighing in on the side of having sponsors and advertisers. It will be better than the unprofessional and idiot spam that’s already infested Twitter now, anyway. I’m sure we can all at least agree on that.
Great post Brian, summarising the state of play and recommendations so far.
The colour coded tweets if universally adopted are a sound idea, as I’m dubious about abbreviations or codes working for a wider audience, of which we need to satisfy the lowest common denominator e.g. casual or search driven traffic, who would only understand “sponsored” – even if it needs 9 characters. Perhaps another alternative is to use a preceding tweet to declare a sponsored tweet.
The issue about ‘everyday people’ delivering the message and sponsored content being effectively stealth is important for the purposes of trust – as literally anyone can be a broadcaster of sponsored content, and the medium is constant/uninterrupted (TV commercials clearly interrupt programs).
Having said that, I don’t think its necessary for individual people to disclose affiliate relationships in tweets (if done responsibly), because by manner of someone choosing to follow their content and being able to unfollow at any time – that is your trust mechanism.
Personally I’m glad Izea are leading the debate on this, having obviously spent a lot of time and money addressing the disclosure issue on both blogging and microblogging, and maintaining a dialogue with the FTC. If it weren’t them, it would be someone else doing it – with perhaps less consideration for the creation of a viable sponsored conversations system .
With affiliate links, the problem is that a follower can’t tell if it’s an affiliate link or not. I don’t think these commission-based tweets should be exempt from disclosure.
quite a debate kicked off in the affiliate world a couple months ago about disclosure in tweets, and I think Lisa Barone’s post summed it up best:
http://outspoke...ffiliate-links/
As long as there is a degree of trust and the intent is good, your follower isn’t going to care you making money off a link – your reputation is more at risk than any other.
You are right about URL shortening obscuring a potential affiliate link, but would you decide not to click a link, knowing that it’s an affiliate link ?
Fundamentally, this is the answer: unfollow people you don’t like, don’t trust, or think are spammy. That’s what it will always come down to.
Companies need to look at the internet as a platform, then look at how other platforms (TV, radio, telephone, etc.) have been successfully monetized. All the answers are there.
Congrats Brian Solis for motivating me to blog about business instead of shoes this morning.
@nondisclosure – interesting coincidence while writing my original comment on Brian’s post I get quoted by you in the meantime!
We have disclosure guidelines for our publishers and as a minimum requirement there must be a disclosure statement present onsite. Cosmopolitan.co.uk has it on their T&Cs page.
Obviously a move toward in-article disclosure we also recommend and best in terms of transparency, but failing any regulations its ultimately up to a publisher who know what’s best/acceptable for their audience.
My point about inline text based links, is based on eConsultancy’s affiliate census they found affiliate marketers prefer to use text links as opposed to banners/creatives, as they are better in terms of conversions. I agree they are more pertinent to disclosure because being more perceived as editorial.
This is really interesting stuff. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to combine twitter with greeting cards. For example, you can tweet a card with a greeting in it to your followers. I’m not sure how it could be optimized for business or profit yet but I think it could be a fun way to keep in touch and maybe eventually advertise… I’m working on using the greetings cards at http://www.last...nutecardkit.com. check it out and tell maybe let me know about how it could be modified for profit….
Here’s what I don’t like about the entire premise, it takes the trust implied in social circles and turns it upside down. The inference is that if I’m paid then what I’m saying is tainted in some way.
Here we are on social media talking for the last two years about making your customers your champions, working hard to tell companies they need to lose control, listen to them on the web, yet now I can just pay for positive coverage?
You mean I just need to stand at the polls and hand out money? Yikes, At last I have a chance to compete with sweatshops in Eastern Europe and India. (sarcasm)
Patricia and David, to your point, in my idealistic frame of mind, I’d like to think this is new. Yes, I’d like to think there can be a change in the way companies and money move in a world with all this access to information, transparency, and opinion.
My concern is that business treats social media as not new, it’s just a more efficient use of technology. It’s the direct mail without the postage and greener.
This idea that integrity could be purchased for the price of a half way decent meal was reserved only for the political candidates and leaders of the free world. This conversation brings that humbling code of ethics to everyone with an opinion and a rent payment.
Perhaps I should reserve my opinions for the highest bidder. Perhaps there will be auction sites where bloggers can bid for their opinions and companies can get the lowest cost, widest coverage possible. Want to make a quick hundred, Walmart’s looking for a few hundred extra comments this month to get their metrics up.
Silly yes?
I agree- my initial position was: you either trust me to be authentic or you don’t. If you do, then you don’t need to know if I was paid to say something- I wouldn’t trade my honesty for money. As you say, Albert, saying OK to disclosure seems to be an admission that you can’t be honest AND get paid at the same time. Lisa Barone said the same thing in a much more rockin way. However, most people are asking for disclosure, and it might be best, all things considered, so we’re going with it.
Albert, this IS a way to make your customers your champions, but without turning them into slaves. How many Pepsi or Coke fans have all day to run a facebook page about it? Wouldn’t it be better if 1000 Pepsi or Coke fans tweeted about it? That takes 5 minutes. Distributed, scalable, efficient.
It’s like the PR companies that want to use mom bloggers’ influence without paying them- in my view, not fair. If their influence is worth something, pay them. They have bills too.
What’s new about social media and business here is that it’s money accelerating positive word of mouth. If the cliche is true that people are 7 times more likely to pass on bad reviews than good, maybe this tilts the word of mouth phenomenon onto a more even keel.
I just had a great Italian dinner here in Jacksonville NC while traveling- I keep thinking about writing a positive review- I would be more likely to remember if they paid me $5 for it.
LOL I do see the dangers of inauthenticity, but I think there are substantial positives to this model too.
@Albert, the problem is the social/communications capabilities on the internet are just a feature. It doesn’t change that the internet itself is a platform and the rules of platform business will mostly apply.
well let’s look at it another way, does disclosure about being paid to provide an opinion shade the way you view that opinion?
I think it does Albert, but many things shade our opinions. Your opinion of your boss’s car is shaded by the fact that he pays you, for example. I just think people get weird with money. It’s only one type of capital, and there are many.
Thanks for including the e-cover of my Advanced Twitter Marketing System, Brian! In it I teach that a marketer’s bio on Twitter should make it obvious they’re using that account for marketing, both for full disclosure and to attract a tightly focused following.
It’s important that the FTC understand one only sees the tweets from those they choose to follow, thus creating their own ‘Twitterverse’. As such, a bio that plainly states that user tweets commercial links, paid, affiliate or otherwise, should suffice for one doing due diligence.
Further, if one inadvertantly follows a marketer or affiliate marketer by mistake, it’s a one-button action to unfollow that account and no longer see their tweets. Try doing that with unsolicited flyers in the offline world!
And just for the record, I’m not a fan of paid tweets – any serious Twitter marketer can make more promoting their own products and affiliate programs they are involved with…
First priority must be longer bios with clickable links.
I used to maintain a link to a disclosure policy in my Twitter profile, until Twitter unlinked and then messed up the link totally.
How about the legal requirement in Europe for business details on websites (in UK it is required for Ltd companies), in a format that is accessible.
Then you have
1. A clear business
2. Disclosure
Certainly in the UK the purpose of running a business is to make money.
It is quite possible that in Silicon Valley the purpose of a business is to spend shareholders money.
This is what I would call “Fundamental Disclosure” which unfortunately is lacking on many US websites, and is impossible on a Twitter account.
Don’t forget to disclose every form of potential payola – I once listed 17 different forms, I could probably come up with 30+ totally unique.
Then of course why would commercial accounts link to anything that isn’t commercial?
Disclosure “I am posting this cool link to encourage you to like me…”
“gain empathy, and do jedi mind tricks on you so that you…”
“buy more of my stuff… oh yea the link xyz.com Free clipart”
I agree very much with Andy here as well as what Albert said above. I think the idea of labeling individual tweets is kind of ridiculous. Tweets must be taken in the context of the trust level of your relationship with the sender of the tweet — are they a trusted friend, an established brand or some random person you auto-followed because they followed you?
A link to a disclosure page would allow those with concerns to easily investigate if they want. But we’re not children. Anyone who makes a major purchase decision purely on the basis of one tweet from one person pretty much deserves what they get.
Brian,
Great post! It really is important to take a step back and look at this from the standpoint of what is fair. What is fair to followers? What is fair to publishers? Ultimately what is fair for the brands who would like to reach influencers. Giving partner ad networks a different API call that includes coloring and maybe a few other options will allow for full disclosure without the possibility of brand hijacking with fake #spon or #ad tweets.
Well said. At TweetROI, we believe it has to be a win-win-win for those three groups. Quality and ROI for marketers, control and payment for twitterers, spamlessness and disclosure for followers.
There are two types of “sponsored conversations,” (a) the obvious and (b) the stealthy.
It’s a bit like ‘product placement’ in films, sometimes it’s overt and other times it’s subtle. The EU regulates product placement in film and TV, the US does not.
The “obvious” business “conversations” should be left alone — Users can opt in/out at will — either they are getting value or they aren’t.
It’s the stealthy secretive (b) conversations that people are concerned with, right? Something passing as “expert” conversation is actually a paid ad.
How about we just leave it alone. A bit like Wikipedia — don’t rely on what you hear via Twitter anymore than you do Wikipedia, some of it may be false. Double check.
Any other regulation would be painful to apply to a platform that is just figuring out whether or not it has any commercial viability to begin with.
Also, if there is going to be something that tags a Tweet, let it be benign, even within the User Name: @______-B (It’s a Business, not “paid”). That’s still 2 characters used up, but, not terrible.
@digijoe
Cosmopolitan discloses where? Who reads terms & conditions? I doubt Hearst Digital is meeting UK consumer protection guidelines which ban outright using editorial content in the media to promote a product where a trader has paid for the promotion without making that clear in the content or by images or sounds clearly identifiable by the consumer (advertorial).
‘Clearly identifiable by images or sounds’ is not a line hidden in a site’s terms and conditions.
Under UK consumer protection legislation, the trader making use of links and the publisher of the material in which the links appear may both technically be liable if as a result of the misleading action or omission, the practice needs to (or be likely to) cause the consumer to take a different decision about any products or related decisions. The reference Cosmopolitan makes to a third party creating affiliate links is irrelevant in my view, it is the trader and publisher who are liable.
“Conversation?”
Come on, “conversation” implies a 2-way dialogue.
Twitter Rants, sponsored or to drive revenue somewhere are NOT conversation. They are spamblats — blathering one directional dialogue of “hey I’m cool, follow me, go where I tell you, somewhere in that process I make money.” But, again, it’s NOT conversation. Techcrunch does this all the time, right? You are promoting yourself, getting Followers to pages you derive ad revenue? So, you’re self-sponsored?
Twitter rarely has conversation, which is too bad. It has statements, re-issues of statements (cool by association) and a little bit of @ affirmations (speaking about the commercial uses).
If someone could figure out how to actually have conversations in this space and encourage back and forth between brands and users, that would be pretty interesting.
Otherwise, it’s like driving down a Highway in the 1960’s, just a lot of billboards that litter the landscape.
Exactly, and the fact we are having this conversation here and not on twitter suggests microblogging may be over-rated.
The business of social media is about earning from working in social spaces and the ftc is right to see that it is government that protects us as more than a subset of commerce.
I don’t see sponsored tweets as any different to the second hand car dealer who parks his cars on a nearby road, writes a hand written sign saying one careful owner ring Brian on tel ……..
The sign is designed to give the impression this is a private sale happening in social space between people (and is already clearly banned under existing consumer protection regulation).
Undisclosed sponsored tweets are the same, they are traders falsely representing themselves as consumers and will be at least forced to disclose and possibly banned outright for publishers of social media once the regulation catches up.
And as soon as they are disclosed just like all advertising they will never the read.
Great, informative post, Brian!
great post
Display advertising is broken. When is the last time you clicked on a display ad? The increasing amounts of advertising dollars flowing online hide the fact that no amount of flash, video or dancing baby animations will improve a message that doesn’t want to be heard.
Advertisers and marketers want to tap the social connections of the web. But so far, it’s the old guard pulling the shots. The old guard believes you have to pay someone to Tweet about a product. The old guard doesn’t understand that consumers love the products they buy and are happy to root for that product. The revolution is still to come.
As the web continues to become more ‘social’, the volume and importance of recommendations will grow too….and so will some of the challenges highlighted in this article. How do we want to surmount these challenges? Do we think the Government can regulate us to the best solution? Or do we believe we can innovate to a better world? Believers in the power of technology know the answer to that question.
The ‘Social Web’ totally changes what effective advertising should be. Why should you believe a company that tells you their brand is good… when you can listen to the Twittersphere and find out exactly what users think of that brand? In this new world of promotion, crap products have nowhere to hide… and great products will shine like they deserve to.
Hollrr.com is leading that revolution. Where the old guard says that ‘if you twitter about a product you must be paid’, Hollrr says ‘there are so many great products out there you want choose your favorite ones and root for them’. Where the old guard says ‘I’m going to pay people to tweet’, Hollrr says ‘I want to root for this new product and if it’s a big success I’m happy to share rewards for discovering it, but if not…that’s just the risk I take for supporting it.’ (…kinda like cheering for the Cubbies in baseball)
By harnessing the power of word of mouth recommendations, we want to overthrow advertising on the Internet. Hollrr is on a mission to eliminate generic, banal banner advertising that no-one likes, and allow fans to liberate great new products struggling to reach new customers.
Viva la revolution!
David Hegarty (@hegs)
Chief Hollrr
Hollrr.com
@topsy – There is a difference between a paid for promotion where the advertiser is pushing a product and paying for the publisher to say precisely what they want (this is an advertorial), and publishers being rewarded for what they were going to write about anyway. Publishers that we work for write what they want to write, about whatever they want to write about, it isn’t advertiser-led. In this case, disclosure in the T&Cs more than meets the requirements of the FTC, which is more concerned about recommendations of financial products rather than recommendations of subjective things like fashion.
I believe very strongly in retaining editorial integrity whilst earning a revenue stream through affiliate marketing, and I think its essential for the longevity of the industry. We know it is possible, and its something we advocate, talk about, and do workshops about, and am happy to talk to you further about it if you want to know more.
I’m in complete agreement with Melanie X.
The biggest problem I see in sponsored ads is not so much ads being there cause ads are proliferating the web anyway. But twitter was so direct and personal you’ll end up with friends upset at each other because you try to monetize your buddies into buying something you don’t truly believe works or recommend.