Izea bravely rolls out sponsored Tweets

Posted on 13. Jul, 2009 by Andrew in Twitter

Rachael Gallagher of Brand Republic has a good write up of Izea’s push into Twitter.

Izea was once known as Pay Per Post and it controversially paid bloggers to write posts – often reviews. Many in the SEO community helped pay the way for Izea’s early success as those paid for reviews would contain valuable links back to the brand’s website.

Google was not happy. Paid links aren’t the sort of editorial link that the search engine uses to judge and assign quality on the web. Google first made it clear that paid for links were against its guidelines and then took action against those using them. The people Google punished first where those bloggers who used their sites to host the sponsored reviews and bought links.

Izea responded by rebranding, encouraging people to disclose that the reviews weren’t organic and insisting that bloggers marked any links generated in this way with rel=”nofollow” so the search engines could safely ignore them.

In the UK the Fair Trading Act update that occurred in May 2008 makes it illegal for a review (either positive or negative) to be given if there’s non disclosed financial involvement. Depending on how Izea is used in the UK then the law may be being broken.

It’s not surprising to see them come to Twitter. Some bloggers are moving their efforts to Twitter. Tweets are easier to produce and consume.

Gallagher reports that Tweets through Izea’s sponsored service will be fully disclosed but with 140 characters to play with there can’t be that much room for pre-click disclosure.

Ted Murphy, Izea’s founder and active CEO, notes that 200 people have already signed up and this is enough to reach one million Twitter users. The bounty of £1 to a staggering £18,700 per Tweet may certainly lure some people over.

What do you think? If one of your Twitter contacts started to post sponsored Tweets how would you react?

Tags: ethics, sponsored

The Brinkwire blog

Izea bravely rolls out sponsored Tweets