Sponsor Tweets: Your Unwelcome Twitter Uncle
By: Brandon J. Mendelson

Before media ownership limits were reduced, print newspapers were plentiful and profitable. The loss of competition and cost cutting to please shareholders caused newspapers to grow stagnant and lose readership. As print readership declined, so did advertising dollars.

Blogs allowed individuals to report news, provide commentary, and serve as a community resource. As they grew in readership, advertisers focused their financial resources on blogs over papers. Will those advertising dollars find themselves budgeted for Twitter? No.

Twitter is blowing up as a source for headlines, not content. Blogs that regurgitate news have been replaced. Why bother reading a blog that makes brief, pithy comments before linking out when you can get the same thing on Twitter? Here’s the catch: Twitter has only changed the way some blogs operate, not replaced all of them the way newspapers are being replaced.

The attraction to Twitter is that it operates like a conversation. Blogs, even personal ones, do not update in real time the way Twitter does. They shouldn’t. It’s social media gospel that too many blog posts or tweets turn readers off. Do you think throwing in an extra tweet, an advertisement, would hurt or help your chances of building influence on Twitter? Trust the gospel on this one.

On your blog, a reader still has to leave a comment, that you may or may not approve. You also have to deal with Trolls and spammers, a rarity on Twitter. Conventional wisdom also dictates successful blogs focus on specific topics, as opposed to a specific person … unless that person is a known commodity. Popular Twitter users are people, not narrowly focused media outlets.

Since I have been blogging, dating back to 1999, I have found including advertisements was and remains acceptable as long as you explain upfront that you will be advertising. There was a shock when the post 2003 blogs started to advertise; however, blogs lend themselves to advertising thanks to their flexibility in design and content. Twitter does not have either as a luxury.

Twitter is not designed to be a media outlet. In fact, Twitter wasn’t designed for anything beyond answering the question, “What are you doing?” All of its other uses were user generated.

Twitter is designed to operate as a conversation. Inserting an advertisement into the middle of a conversation is disruptive. Think about how you would react if your friend, in mid-sentence, made an unrelated commercial announcement before resuming what they were saying? I realize some blogs do this, but unsuccessfully and to the reader’s chagrin. On a blog, you have options to avoid torturing your readers with certain methods of advertising. In Twitter, you have your conversation and only two ways to advertise: Disrupt the conversation or advertise on the background.

The expectations of Twitter followers are different than blog readers. This was not always the case, but with blog / newspaper hybrids such as The Huffington Post, we have come to expect blogs to be monetized in some way. Twitter, as a conversation, is not designed for monetization. This may change, but the format and conversational style today does not lend itself to monetization the way a blog does.

But what about microblogging? You could make the argument that paid microbloggers already exist in the form of social media workers who make their wage by blogging, microblogging, and engaging far and interwebs wide on the behalf of their organizations.

Let’s set aside this growing industry and look instead at those manic Twitter fiends, those FriendFeed addicts, those Pownce, uh, pouncers and whether it’s possible to microblog one’s passions and beliefs and expertise into some kind of tangible financial sum.

I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot lately and have come to the conclusion that while it is possible, the idea is still so new that it will take people some time to get used to it.

When Magpie, an “ad network for Twitter” launched recently, I was very curious to see how people would react. The deal with Magpie, as the site explains, is:

1. Advertisers create campaigns providing a message and some keywords.
2. Matching twitterers are selected, costs are calculated based on # of followers and hotness of the topic.
3. Ads will be blended into the message stream: 5 tweets, one ad, 5 tweets, one ad, …

In other words, as a microblogging Twitter addict, you sign up, set the interval of Magpie ads that you’re willing to accept on your Twitter feed, and then in theory let the riches roll in as you monetize your “life stream” through this rent-my-Twitter-ad space service. Magpie, for its part, attempts to place contextually relevant ads into your stream based on the topics you’re “tweeting” about.

As you might expect, the reaction from some has been negative, to say the least:

* The idea of twitter.com/beamagpie is completely spam-annoying

* Be-A-Magpie Is PayPerPost For Twitter

And here’s a pretty good representative reaction of Magpie fear and loathing on Twitter:

What the brass tits is Magpie? I feel instinctively that it is wrong, that I must hate it. Is this correct?

Check out Twitter search for “hate magpie” for more (if less entertaining) of same!

Reactions such as these led me to wonder why some would react so strongly to the insertion of advertising into the previously “pure” Twitter environment. I then recalled that only some 8-10 years ago, there was a sizeable contingent that didn’t believe in online advertising of any form.

So it takes time for people to get used to new stuff. That doesn’t mean that Magpie will become the advertising behemoth of the social media world, but I still can’t help but think that as microblogging becomes an ever more important part of the online publishing realm, there will be a natural need for advertising services to support it.

So Magpie falls under the general heading of “sponsored posts.” This led me to go a little further to think that, in fact, sponsored posts are already a staple of the blogging world, particularly with those “big blog” sites that attract large audiences and the heavy hitting sponsors that go with it.

Mashable is a great example of a publisher who employs this kind of online advertising. They run occasional posts in which the entire content of the post is material about their sponsors. Presumably, the vast majority of Mashable readers are fine with this, understanding that websites need to pay the bills, and some people probably find the sponsor information intriguing enough to click a link and check it out more closely… which makes the advertising and Internet economies spin round, of course.

Now, what’s the difference – really – between a Mashable sponsored post and a Magpie tweet inserted into a Twitter feed? I would argue that there are differences, but that they are more subtle and nuanced than many might recognize upon first glance.

This post, by the way, was kicked off by a fantastic conversation on Twitter itself. I had a ball trying to poke holes in the argument, playing devil’s advocate at times, with the likes of Marc Vermut, David N. Wilson, and Brandon J. Mendelson.

My Twitter feed is available here.

Now let me explain.

Over the summer I wrote several pieces about this emerging idea called Blogging 2.0. My sense at the time was that successful bloggers (more on how to define this below) would need to continue to churn out valuable content, network effectively in their space, get linked by high quality websites, and so forth, but would also need to engage in the emerging social media space, on red hot communications platforms such as Twitter, FriendFeed, and Disqus.

In Blogging 2.0: from surviving to thriving, I wrote:

My sense is that there’s a galaxy of well intentioned and ambitious bloggers out there who are and will be trying to figure out how to find their way in this new and strange era of distributed conversations (i.e. you spend the time, brain power, expertise, and hard work to create and share a new idea on your blog and it ends up being discussed in any number of other places).

…successful Bloggers 2.0 need to dive headlong into the places where eyeballs are and conversations are being held. The idea is to make friends, share ideas, and above all else promote one’s personal brand with the hope that people will eventually find their way back to your blog. It’s “old fashioned” online promotion – make friends, show that you’re smart and have something to share, and the people will hopefully follow.

So my overriding theory was that activities outside of the “home blog” should hopefully in the end lead to increased activity and participation back on the home site.

Now we’re hitting the end of the year. Social media participation and engagement is more intense than ever, drawing time and attention spans ever further away from these very home sites, and that’s not really even touching on the “distributed conversation” side of things!

The basic question that I’m left with these days is a somewhat existential one I suppose: can participation on social media sites become its own good?

Or in slightly less lofty terms: can successful bloggers evolve into some sort of successful blogger/microblogger hybrid? In specific terms, this means less posts and less words and less engagement on home sites in favor of relatively more of all of that on social media and microblogging platforms.

My sense is that yes they can, and yes, they will probably have to in this quickly evolving environment.

To quote myself on Twitter today:

Meaning that from now on *probably* the best bloggers will also tend to be the best microbloggers/social media publishers, and vice versa

Now, back to the definition of “successful blogger” for just a second. Obviously this can mean many different things. If it means making money, the new blogger/microblogger hybrid will change the equation some. I’m particularly fascinated at the moment with advertising services (such as Magpie for Twitter and Adjix for link shrinking) that seek to bring revenue directly to social media participants. This industry niche is extremely new though and is struggling with initial resistance from purists even as start-ups in the space figure out their own business models. But the tremendous movement in the overarching social media space will surely bring more players, more competition, and innovation.

Aside from the money part, success may mean things like learning opportunities, personal branding, product/service promotion, networking, and all round high fun and online conversatin’. All of these things seem to play into the blogging/microblogging hybrid model extremely well.

All of that said, I wouldn’t be surprised to have substantially evolved (or you can say changed, perhaps!) opinions about this topic in a few months. That’s how quickly things are moving.