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Corporate-Sponsored Celebrity Tweets on the Rise

by Terrence O'Brien on August 31, 2009 at 05:41 PM

Corporate Sponsored Tweets on the Rise

If you spend much time on Twitter, you might have noticed an increasing number of celebrities tweeting their love for particular products and brands. Former Playmate Holly Madison and reality TV star Kim Kardashian are two noteworthy participants in a new marketing technique that some are calling pay-per-tweet.

Madison and Kardashian have been hired to tweet about Giorgio Armani by Izea, a social media marketing firm formerly known as Pay-Per-Post, which paid bloggers to write about and review products. In its current incarnation, IZEA is paid by large companies, such as Armani and Blockbuster, to find appropriate bloggers and twitterers (only a few of whom are celebrities) to push products and services. These social networking publicists are then paid by IZEA for their efforts. The company has stirred up some controversy thanks to its hazy disclosure policy, which doesn't always make clear whether or not postings are in fact sponsored by companies. (To that end, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is trying to institute guidelines that would force such sponsored posts to be identified as such, the FTC's Mary Engle told USA Today.)



Izea isn't the only game in town, though. TweetROI launched in early July and hooks up marketers with average Twitter users who want to make a little marketing money on the side.

All of this, of course, is just adding noise to an already cacophonous social media sphere -- where it's become increasingly difficult to find worthwhile content amid the multitudes of sponsored tweets, official corporate accounts, and chronic over-sharers. This new distraction doesn't diminish the value of Twitter, but it is an inevitable growing pain for an increasingly popular and powerful social networking tool.

Eventually, we think, the balance of content will reach equilibrium, and marketers will be able to advertise without getting in the way of our legitimate socializing. In the meantime, we'll all just have to tolerate the rise of the adverti-tweet. [From: USA Today via Textually.org]

Tags: advertising, holly madison, HollyMadison, izea, kim kardashian, KimKardashian, marketing, pay per tweet, PayPerTweet, top, twitter, viral marketing, ViralMarketing

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