Twitter's elite cash in with promotions

It's inevitable that those with enormous Twitter followings will begin to leverage their accounts as media channels. After all, Twitter and promotion (usually of the self variety) go hand in hand. Perez Hilton, the celebrity blogger with nearly 1.2 million followers, has linked up with Sony for its new release The Ugly Truth. His rep firm, BlogAds, put together a promotion that includes him sending out sponsored tweets about the movie and changing his background to promote it. The centerpiece is a voting ad unit on PerezHilton.com where visitors can select the best dating advice sent to @uglytruthmovie. Those voted the best responses will get billing on PerezHilton.com. Thanks to Izea and others, regular Joes will soon have their own shots at cashing in on their followings. Will it hurt their credibility? Henry Copeland, CEO of BlogAds, says it won't so long as the sponsored tweets are few and far between. Someone like Perez Hilton entertains millions thanks to the support of advertising. It give him license to do some pretty aggressive marketing on his site—the ad deal includes skinning his site when the movie is released on July 24—and makes a little Twitter promotion a small price to pay for his followers. BlogAds has two more campaigns lined up for Perez Hilton that will use Twitter, Copleand said. The bigger risk probably exists with regular users lured by the promise of rewards to tweet about brands. The whole attraction of such endorsements is that they're deemed authentic. As Social Media CEO Seth Goldstein notes, "I think the minute you compensate people from tweeting you throw all the credibility out the window."

—Posted by Brian Morrissey

July 13, 2009 in News and Analysis | Permalink