Izea to pay Twitterers to hype products
When Pay Per Post first launched, it generated no end of negative publicity. The company pays bloggers to write about products. That seemed to violate the spirit of the blogosphere.
But rather than wilt from the criticism, Pay Per Post re-branded itself as Izea and is now moving into new marketing territory: Twitter.
The new platform, called Sponsored Tweets, that will offer Twitter users the option of sending their followers messages about brands and products. Twitterers will get paid based either on the number of clicks they receive or on a flat fee per tweet.
Users will set their rates and Izea advertisers will select participants for their campaigns. Sponsored Tweets is set to formally launch in about a month, according to Ted Murphy, Izea's CEO. Blockbuster is currently offering bloggers 68 cents per click in a promotion for its online movie service.
The complaints about Izea’s service is that posters are not always sufficiently forthcoming with attribution. The FTC has since weighed in, setting new guidelines for bloggers who endorse products for payment.
Izea has signed up some high profile bloggers like Julia Allison and Chris Brogan, but the company’s primarily client base is small bloggers with audiences of only a few hundred readers per month. Twitter – the majority of whose members have a small number of followers - has a similar appeal. The company says it also aims to expand into other social media platforms like YouTube.
Izea has already run a handful of Twitter advertising campaigns. Blockbuster is currently offering recipients 68 cents per click in a promotion for its online movie service.
Should newspaper consider using Izea's service as well, either to promote subscriptions or specific articles or special features?
Sponsored twitter posts carry a #spon hash-tag in the messages.
Izea has competition. Magpie offers users money to post messages, but Magpie’s messages can’t be changed, Izea lets users write what they want.
Will the Twittosphere find itself even more up in arms than the blog world? With the kind of immediate mass feedback that Twitter engenders, we’ll know soon enough.
