Likes.com, left, and Ad.ly offer different paths to having people share advertising messages on social networks. The Likes system is to start next month.
Twitter is getting a lot of attention lately. PR and ad people love it. From the standpoint of having a captive audience that you can sell more stuff to, what's not to love? It is a direct line into consumers. Even academia is jumping on the bandwagon. I listened to a communications school dean at a national conference this summer suggest that PhD candidates should study Twitter as a news medium. "That would make a very interesting dissertation topic," the dean said. (Yes, he was serious.) The news in 41 characters? As this story indicates, it is beginning to look like Twitter is really only good for one thing - quick, short blasts - the kinds of attention getters that have nothing to do with news. Instead, Twitter is more like the clever radio jingles of the 1930s hawking cigarettes, soap and whatever else companies are trying to sell. - MT
The New York Times - Twitter 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.
Even the Internet giants are warming to the idea of harnessing informal chats between friends to promote their products and services. This month, Amazon.com said it would start paying commissions to individuals who refer buyers to the site via Twitter messages. (People must first sign up for Amazon Associates, a program in which Amazon pays Web publishers for referrals to its site.)
But the bigger opportunity may be in matching advertisers with so-called influencers — the more popular users of services like Twitter. A number of start-ups, like Ad.ly, Izea and Peer2, a division of Creative Asylum, a Hollywood ad agency, are pursuing the opportunity to put persuasive messages into regular dialogue on social networks.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/business/22ping.html
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