Parasitevertising - Killing the thing you love via Twitter......

So, the last resort of Advertising is getting people to pimp stuff to their followers - Mr John Chow, with 50,000 Twittwr followers:

....earned $200 by telling his fans where they could buy M&M’s with customized faces, messages and colors.

Mr. Chow is among a growing group of celebrities, bloggers and regular Internet users who are allowing advertisers to send commercial messages to their personal contacts on social networks. For the last month, he has used the services of Ad.ly, a start-up based in Los Angeles, and Izea, based in Orlando, Fla., to periodically surrender his Twitter stream to the likes of Charter Communications, the Make a Wish Foundation and an online seminar about working from home.

In October, Mr. Chow’s income from Twitter ads was around $3,000. “I get paid for pushing a button,” he said.

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.

(From the New York Times)

Brilliant. Just Brilliant. And do you think the next turn of this particular game will be:

(i) Followers are delighted that you are advertising to them and sign up in droves

(ii) Followers will decide you are compromised and sign off in droves

(iii) Followers will ignore the Ads and keep on listening if the other content is good enough

Now your instinct is probably (iii) - to start with. But what will happen as a larger and larger % of people start to pimp Ads through Twitter onto your flowstream? Or as one person pimps more Ads through themself.

Advertising, like tourism, tends to kill the thing it loves over time because it suffers from tragedy of the commons effects (if no in-system mechanism exists to moderate Ads) and its usual response to the lessening impact of Ads is to increase the volume. Which upstets more people....

If I were the Twitterpeople, I'd be very careful..... in the Twitter Ecosystem these act something like parasites, and they may well damage the host if it is not careful.

Update: Useful analysis of the issues from Going Social Now (abridged below):

1. Your users can revolt with mass un-following
The twitterati who stand to gain the most, will need to test how comfortable their followers are with receiving these advertisements. Formats, frequency and content - all need to be figured out. Because these are new formats (and frankly speaking, the whole platform is still very new), we do not know what will work as yet. We all get irritated by people who tweet a bit too much as it is.

2. Lack of technological sophistication may kill the model
If a Google adwords model is put in place and we start seeing ads on twitter in droves, there will probably be a strong backlash. Unlike other platforms, you currently can't cookie a user who's seeing an advertisement on Twitter. So if I follow five twitter users who accept advertising, there's a chance that I may see the same advertisement from each of them in the span of an afternoon. That would be problematic. The networks need to be implemented with the right technology infrastructure behind it. Twitter must help here.

3. Black box ROI that makes it difficult to compare
Click thru rates cannot provide enough ROI - there will need to be CPM models in place as well. The problem is that there are few good ways to measure impressions. Sure you have the number of followers but that doesn't mean that the total number of followers actually saw the ads. The problem is compounded when you have people using twitter applications to access their streams. There's no way of finding out whether a user has actually seen a tweet. You also need to know whether the users fit your target demographics.

4. Advertisers choose not to intrude on conversations
Advertisers are savvy group of people. They're also increasingly sensitive about how their brands are perceived in the social media space. And by sensitive I don't just mean that they're worried about someone speaking ill of them but about appearing to be invading on a user's social world too. It is left to be seen how many advertisers will sign up for twitter ad networks. Many will probably take a wait and see approach. The last thing an advertiser would want is a backlash against their brand. I for one would recommend that advertisers invest in developing their own social voices first before experimenting with twitter ad formats.

5. Lack of transparency hurts the Twitter trust model
It is sometimes easy to forget that twitter is built on trust. We share more than we realize often because we trust that no one will use the information against us. Our followers reward us with their attention and the conversations that ensue. If there's no transparency in the twitter advertising, some of that trust will be broken. Before you know it, the FTC will feel obliged to institute guidelines or requirements for advertising in this space too. So there's a risk that the advertising may not be as transparent as it should be. And that's where disclosure codes like those recommended by Jon Burg will matter a lot. Maybe these twitter ad networks can build disclosure codes into their platforms?

As with popups, I'd assume that there will be an early market for plugins to kill the Ads (TwAkismet anyone?)