Here’s an idea: spam your friends.

Companies are increasingly recruiting regular people to become advocates for their products & services– without requiring those people to disclose their commercial connection to these companies.

The concept is simple: you sign up for one of these services, and grant advertisers permission to send out tweets or posts on [...]]]>

Here’s an idea: spam your friends.

Companies are increasingly recruiting regular people to become advocates for their products & services– without requiring those people to disclose their commercial connection to these companies.

The concept is simple: you sign up for one of these services, and grant advertisers permission to send out tweets or posts on your behalf. Each time someone clicks on the link in your post, you are paid a fee by the service.

And you thought application spam was bad. As The New York Times‘ Brad Stone puts it–

…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.

“We don’t want to create an army of spammers, and we are not trying to turn Facebook and Twitter into one giant spam network,” said Joey Caroni, co-founder of Peer2. “All we are trying to do is get consumers to become marketers for us.”

Got that? We don’t want an army of spammers. We just want everyone you know to market our stuff.

via Ping – Hiring Tweeters and Bloggers to Send Ads – NYTimes.com.

and even:

in an apparent bid to capitalize on the Iranian election fiasco. People protested against this enormous breach of Twitter protocol, and, to [...]]]> An interesting analysis of how not to use Twitter to promote your brand. HabitatUK, and upscale furniture retailer, launched its Twitter profile and immediately began inserting misleading hashtags into its tweets, such as:

• #iPhone
• #MMS
• #TRUE_BLOOD

and even:

• #MOUSAVI

in an apparent bid to capitalize on the Iranian election fiasco. People protested against this enormous breach of Twitter protocol, and, to its credit, HabitatUK issued an apology a few days later. This remains an important case study in the risks a brand runs in thinking it can game the social ecosystem.

How not to use Twitter: HabitatUK as a case study .