This tweet's for sale

As I was sipping my morning cup of Ethical Bean© coffee (freshly made in the Bodum© French Press) and munching on a Mount Royal™ bagel, my eye fell on an article in the Sunday New York Times™.  Apparently Vancouver blogger John Chow was making thousands of dollars a month by sending advertisements to his followers on Twitter™! “I get paid for pushing a button,” Chow said.

Well, I wondered, how do I cash in on this? I quickly did the math. John Chow has 50,000 followers. He makes $3,000 a month by allowing a third-party advertising company to send out occasional commercial messages to those followers. That’s six cents per follower. Last time I checked, I had 343 followers. So at six cents per follower I could make $20.58 a month by pitching M&Ms and Cheese Doodles (whatever they are). Easy Street here I come!

Of course, I would run the risk of lowering my credibility (such as it is) with those 343 followers and probably losing a lot of them as well. For $20 a month, I decided it’s not worth it to sell my Twitter soul. But, according to the Times article, a growing number of bloggers and tweeters are capitalizing on their “fame” to make money: “It is perhaps the last frontier in advertising — getting regular people to send a sentence or two of text, on behalf of paying advertisers, to their friends and admirers. The idea, according to the entrepreneurs who are developing such services for Twitter and other Web networks, is that people trust recommendations from those they know and respect, while they increasingly ignore nearly ever other kind of ad message in print, on television and online,” says Times reporter Brad Stone.

Besides Twitter advertisements (tweetverts?), Stone discusses the slightly more established, and just as controversial, practise of product placement in blogs (as for example, if Bodum, Mount Royal, Ethical Bean, The New York Times and Twitter had paid me for mentioning them in the opening paragraph).

Richard Smith, a communications professor at Simon Fraser University, is sceptical about both Twitter ads and the amount of money that they supposedly bring in. “I can't imagine how you'd make $3,000 a month doing that, other than spamming thousands of people. I only have 500 followers and I consider a good number of them friends, so I'd no more send them ads in my Twitter feed than I would send them email ads. I suppose it could be effective if it was genuine - like ‘I stayed in a great hotel, here's the link,’ but as an ongoing thing, no.”

Smith feels that Twitter accounts that are upfront about their commercial nature (he himself subscribes to AC_webSaver, which provides alerts about last-minute deals on Air Canada) can be useful. But he doesn’t believe that mingling personal and commercial tweets is effective. “I actually did this in a indirect way,” he confesses. “Some software ‘offers’ give you a free or discounted price if you tweet that you've adopted/downloaded it, but when I saw the effect (it looks like an ad in my tweet stream), I discontinued doing it. I don't want my tweet feed to be commercial.”

John Chow thinks differently. He is very upfront about how he makes money through social media. On his website, johnchow.com (“The Miscellaneous Ramblings of a Dot Com Mogul”), he writes: “As some of you many know, I recently joined a new pay per tweet network call Ad.ly to see how they compare to Sponsored Tweets. The early results has been pretty amazing and I think every Twitter user should jump on this.”

The jury’s still out on the effectiveness of Twitter ads and blog product placements. But meanwhile, John (“I make money online by telling people how I make money online” Chow is making $3,000 a month because of the belief that they do work.

Assuming he's right, I'd like the marketing folks at Ethical Bean, Bodum, Mount Royal, New York Times and Twitter to know that they can make their cheques out to me, care of the Vancouver Observer.