I was just made aware of this Ad.ly – a new online service that puts your tweets up for sale to advertisers. I made a short (3minutes) video on this cause I want to hear your thoughts on this!
The design community on Twitter is so awesome and I wonder what selling our tweets might do to the interaction? What do YOU think?
PS: sorry for the dreadfully messy hair ;)
I think the tweet-selling idea is dreadful. It’s one thing for a sponsor to put its own image out there and artfully plug its product, but it’s an entirely different thing for you and me to start plugging products for money.
One thing that I love about social media is the inherent trust we have in one another. Like everyone else, I do take tweets and status updates etc with a grain of salt – but I think we’re all here doing the same thing, so most people come off as credible. So I may plug my personal chef (letmelissacook.com!) and you may plug your auto body guy, and we can generally believe that we’re not materially compensated for those recommendations.
Take away the trust, and we’ve got nuttin’. Thanks for asking!
Lauri Jordana
P.S. Your hair is swell, but your walls could use some art. ;-)
@Lauri,
I should’ve pointed the camera the opposite way, you’d see all the random stuff on the wall right by my computer! :)
I totally agree with you on the “trust” issue! So may of us share resources on Twitter, but it is so different if I really enjoy or find value in a product/service than if i’m being paid to tweet it out… I’m not against advertising — I have advertising on my blog — but advertising just doesn’t seem to fit into the personal feel of Twitter, to me.
First off, HI! :) I was led here just yesterday by the lovely Sarah Bray and I just wanted to say you are awesome because a) your name is Liz, and Liz’s are just naturally that way and b) your design work/blog are an inspiration to me as an aspiring freelancer. Woot!
As far as the ad.ly service, I came across is yesterday and like you, my gut reaction is that it’s retarded. I really don’t think I would continue following anyone on my list who uses this service. It would be annoying. I care about what the person who’s account I follow has to say, not what the advertisers using them as a channel have to say.
That’s just my two cents!
Hey Liz! :)
It will be interesting to see how people start to feel about this once the ads start running through their stream! I haven’t seen any run yet, but i’ve got an eye out for that (Ad by Ad.ly) tag on Twitter!
Thanks for checking out the site and for getting in on this discussion, I look forward to hearing yr 2cents again! :)
I think it’s a huge turn-off and I would most definitely stop following someone from such a tweet.
It’s grimy and sad in my opinion.
Cheers!
“Ad.ly helps you get compensated for your hard work creating content on Twitter. ”
…ya like i put that much work into ‘creating tweets’ I think twitter advertising is lame. My tweets are from me, not some spam-bot! I tweet about stuff I create, stuff I like. Twitter is about friends and interacting with the creative community, not making money.
I dunno @Niki,
you just make it *look* effortless, haha.
Seriously who is WORKING at crafting a tweet? How hard can you work at 140 characters?
I just put up another video inspired by some of the talk here of sharing trusted content vs. adverting.
Hey Liz!
I also feel that Twitter should be an authentic social platform.
I’d never sell my tweets… I’m an artist, a webdesigner and also an internet marketer, but I hate when people use twitter just to “make money”, like using automation services and not being around ever, or outsource their account. I even seriously doubt the marketing effectiveness of this.
@Niki I don’t think Twitter should never be used to make some money, I mean, if you have your own products and you advertise them with taste and style it’s OK with me. Or if you’ve tried and loved a product that offers an affiliate commision and you tweet about it and get some money for that it’s fair, I’d trust you if you recommend some webdesign service or product, specially if your tweet sends me to your blog and there you make a good review about it or something.
Anyway, I think it would be noticable that there’s a lack of consistency in a twit stream that has foreign ads on it.
If you’d like to follow me, its @davidriveroll . I swear it’s always me the one behind my tweets!
As the as they were cleared marked as ads, if it let people support tweeting more “full-time”, it might be good. When ads came to blogs, lots of people objected and stopped following their blogs. But it made it possible for people to spend far more time on their blogs and we saw a lot of higher-quality blogs appear. So, I don’t know, but it might work out.
@David @Dan
While I agree with David that Twitter *is* a different format and should be a platform for more “authentic” interaction, I really do also see Dan’s point as well.
The only thing is – blogging can easily become a full-time gig.. and if that’s the route your wanting to go — you HAVE to find a way to monetize it, and of course selling adspace is the best way to do that. However, Twitter .. cmon, it’s micro-blogging. It’s 140 characters… if you want to share your content with the world as a full time gig, start a blog and sell ads there. See Ads on a blog (if done right) don’t interfere with the readers experience.. whereas ads in your Twitter stream do. If I am following @whoevertheheck cause I am interested in the content they Tweet, but then 50% of what they’re sending out is suddenly 3rd party ads — this makes their stream 50% less relevant to me.
Agreed that it would have to be closer to 5% ads than 50% ads. And the twitter is different than blogging, but sometimes writing something short is harder than writing something long. If you’re a master of the format.
It will be interesting to see where this service goes, if it makes an impact on the Twitter experience or not.