IZEA has already built a reputation for providing a platform for paid blog posts with its Pay Per Post initiative. Now, it’s bringing the same idea to Twitter with Sponsored Tweets. That’s right folks, you can now be paid for tweeting, that is if you’re comfortable selling yourself and your Twitter account out for a few bucks every month.

The idea of getting paid for publicizing a company, product, or brand is one that has been with us for a long time. We’re all used to seeing celebrities wearing certain clothes, a particular make of watch, or some exclusive sunglasses because they’re getting the product for free and getting paid to promote them at every opportunity.

But the idea of doing something similar on the Web, whether it’s well known faces or ordinary people like you and me, is something else entirely. Bloggers reviewing something and getting to keep the product is acceptable. As is getting a first look at a product in order to give others an opinion on how good or bad it is. But getting paid to write a positive review or promoting a product over and above what is normal isn’t.

That’s not to say people don’t do it. That practice is what Pay Per Post was built on, whether disclosure was part of the deal or not. And the trend has now found its way on to Twitter. It’s been known for a while that IZEA had plans for a pay-per-Tweet operation, and it has now arrived in the form of Sponsored Tweets.

As first reported by Mashable, Sponsored Tweets teams up companies looking to advertise on Twitter with Twitterers willing to risk their friends and reputation by promoting whoever will pay them. Interested Twitter users can set their charge rates, etc. and then wait for the offers to come trickling in. There are stringent and specific disclosure guidelines in place, but Sponsored Tweets still comes down to increasing Twitter spam at the end of the day.

This whole thing is a good idea for advertisers looking to push their products or brands on an untapped yet popular Web property and for Twitter users who don’t mind leaving their morals at the door. But for the rest of us no good can come of it. Even Twitter itself stands to lose from it because as well as not seeing a penny in revenues from Sponsored Tweets, if this and other services like it become very popular then Twitter could lose its appeal very quickly for a lot of people.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 at 12:56 am under Advertising, Ecommerce, Internet, Opinion, Social Media, Technology.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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