Opinions for sale, a round up

Apr 22, 2009 by Dirk Singer

A few related posts over the past few days point to the increasing tendency of what you could perhaps (kindly) call social media product placement. Social media participants – bloggers, tweeple et al – are given inducements to stick product messages into their commentary.

Magpie

First up we have Magpie – a sure way to lose friends on Twitter. Or as they would have you believe, a sure way to get payment for what you enjoy doing anyway (tweeting).

Two weeks back Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote a strongly worded piece on Readwriteweb entitled, “How to Sell your Soul on Twitter and Who’s Buying”, all about the fairly crass way Magpie gets ad messages into tweets – without disclosure – with major brands (or their affiliate ad partners) taking part in the scheme. According to Marshall:

”So there’s the Twitter-sphere for you! Bring on “real time search,” bring on a globally connected community, bring on vapid, vile, stupid shilling. It all seems pretty sad to me. And to the advertisers out there – is this cynical scheme the best you can do to engage with all the new ways people are communicating online? That’s pretty bad.”

‘The Psychology of deception’

The sponsored tweet is of course on the same continuum as the sponsored blog post, something that Ben Kunz of Media Associates has been outspoken about over the past few months.

In Ben’s latest post on the subject, ‘Paid posts and the psychology of deception’, he takes one A-List blogger and respected agency director to task for eulogising on Twitter about how great it is to watch telly on his Panasonic, when at the same time Panasonic is his client:

“There is no question that paid posts deceive by elevating a topic artificially and by inserting opinions more favorable because they have been bought.”

Social networks doing better than paid search in driving traffic

The reason why all this is happening is simple: Brands are acutely aware of the need for people to talk them up online. The latest statistics from metrics firm Hitwise show that in the UK, online retailers are getting less traffic from paid search and more from social networks.

According to analyst Robin Goad: “The proportion of search traffic that comes from paid listings fell from 27.8% in March 2008 to 22.5% in March 2009”, meanwhile, “it is perhaps no surprise to see that the amount of traffic our Shopping and Classifies category receive from social networking websites increased from 5.2% in March 2008 to 7.1% in March 2009.”

As ad pundit Alan Wolk points out in his latest blog post, two years ago David Armano wondered if the “ad industry could pollute Twitter.” His prediction was encapsulated in a diagram below. Maybe an idea whose time has come?

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