Apple, Skype, Adobe, Others Pay Twitterers for Promos

It was only back in January that we saw Belkin make itself look like a fool by advertising to pay consumers who would write glowing product reviews, whether they had used the products or now. Well, it seems that companies never learn, and now there’s a veritable flock of magpies — Apple, Skype, Kodak, Flip Cisco [UPDATE: Cisco's acquisition of Flip has not yet closed], Adobe, Roxio, PC Tools, and Box.net, to name a few — trying to snag some good will for themselves by paying consumers to say nice things about them on Twitter.

Congratulations to Marshall Kirkpatrick on ReadWriteWeb for breaking this story. He stumbled across how a number of high-profile companies were using the pay-per-tweet company Magpie to get people to promote their products and services. The service works on a bidding system:

For advertisers, it essentially works on a keyword bidding system. When your chosen keywords match those tweets of a user, and you have the highest bid, you tweet from that user’s account.

Links redirected through Magpie go directly to advertisers’ web pages. The concept seems to be to fake word-of-mouth and testimonials – look at Kirkpatrick’s piece and your jaw will drop at the uniformity of wording for most of these tweets.

As major companies start using this approach, the controversy is coming to the fore, because this is PR that is bought and paid for, not the result of genuine and spontaneous customer support. Here are some of the high tech products and services I found touted like winners at a race track through Magpie-redirected URLs:

• Apple’s Mac Box Set and iWork and refurbished Apple TVs and refurbished iPods
• Skype’s associated hardware and services
• Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus and Registry Mechanic by PC Tools
• Flip video cameras, just bought by Cisco [The acquisition has not yet closed.]
• Used Macs from PowerMac
• Roxio Video Capture USB and Easy VHS to DVD and Popcorn 3
• Box.net online storage
• FatCow web hosting
• Kodak’s digital camera trade-in program
• Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium, Student Edition

Apparently the StubHub ads that Kirkpatrick found did not come out in the search that I conducted, suggesting that every time you search might bring more surprises.

The drive for Twitter users to do this is money. For those with a significant number of followers, the number could potentially be significant. Not that anyone is claiming that Wil Wheaton, Kevin Smith, or anyone else is playing the shill. But the fact that large companies are doing this does raise the question of how many celebrity plugs for products on Twitter would ever genuine or innocent. (Presumably such people would cut private deals and not go through a Magpie-like service.)

Not that Magpie is easy going. According to the site, it “identifies the most influential Magpie-Twitterers for a campaign based on the selected keywords.” Advertisers can set budgets either by day or by cost per thousand impressions. If there are multiple potential shills … oh, sorry, Magpie-Twitterers … then the campaign goes to an online auction to get the best price for the advertiser. Payment to Magpie comes in advance, so the company never has to shell out cash to the people on Twitter and not get reimbursed.

To be fair, a very few of the hundreds and hundreds of messages I looked through either noted that the post was an ad or added a #magpie tag to alert people. But the vast majority simply pass these messages on as though they were actual recommendations. In addition, although I’d bet that the advertisers would hope for plenty of retweets, that seems rare. Also, the biggest single user of Magpie recommendations seems to be … Magpie itself. However, its promotional activity might be explained by this bit of information on the site:

For any new Advertiser who signs up through your personal referral link, you will earn a 30% commission of our transaction fees. Not just once, but for the whole first year this Advertiser buys campaigns on Magpie!

This could be enormously damaging to the brands. Look at Apple, which has been known as having some of the most virulently loyal customers in the industry. Now, I’ve worked with enough designers, artists, coders, and other creative types to know that some genuinely like the company’s products, and certainly the success in the market of the iPhone and iPod earn respect. But something like this makes you wonder how much of the most vocal support has been nothing more than shilling. After all, at least so far as I know, Apple was the first company with a brand evangelist on staff. Is it really that hard to believe that it might have been paying others all this time to say nice things?

Consider, too, what damage can happen to corporate positioning. One tweet from #corporateblogs, promoting the Adobe student version of Creative Suite 4, read as follows:

#sponsor can you actually use the adobe student versions for business too (if you’re a student) ?

In some cases, a company can get tarred with the Magpie brush without being directly involved. For example, the Logitech name appears in a number of the paid tweets, but the link goes to a Skype page that is selling Logitech products. However, that link has now been made, and there are plenty of opportunities for this to happen. I was able to find 500 of these Magpie messages (including their own come-ons) that had been posted within about ten hours of my search.

[UPDATE: My colleague David Weir on BNET Media has a story of how some national journalists in the UK are allegedly taking money to include links in their editorial blog posts with no hint that they were bought and paid for.]

[UPDATE 2: Some commentators are claiming that the ads are actually sponsored by affiliate sales agents who are trying to drive traffic to get credit for the traffic. Marshall Kirkpatrick said that one of the companies he mentioned contacted him to say that it was "most likely outside affiliates." My take? So what? If, indeed, affiliates are doing this, they can only afford to because they are paid for driving traffic traffic, and so are part of a vendor's distribution chain and marketing plan. The company has a relationship with these people, and I find it pretty hard to believe that the lawyers and marketing people at these companies aren't monitoring Twitter for mentions of their companies. So, what, they're just shocked, shocked that Twitter's equivalent of spam may be sending business their way? Please, tell it to someone who fell off the turnip truck. I'm thoroughly aware of how quickly most of these companies could get a cease and desist letter to Germany through one of the law firms they use in such situations. If they aren't taking action, it's because they don't want to, and so are complicit.

Also, Allen Stern claims that I "didn't actually check out the links" before posting this article. Sorry to disappoint, Allen, but I spent a chunk of time clicking through links and seeing where they ended up. Is there some difference in the links? Yup, a different number at the ends, generally -- and before you say, "Clearly affiliates," consider that there has to be a difference to track which of the tweeters is actually getting results for a given click through. Maybe he should have actually taken his own advice and emailed me to ask what I had done before drawing his conclusion.]

Magpie image via Flickr user carnagevisor, CC 2.0.