Does Advertising through Be A Magpie (twitter advertising) Work?

December 2nd, 2008 by admin

Last month I heard about a new upcoming advertising platform on twitter and last week when it went live, I decided to sample it to get an idea of how it might work, where it might have potential and if it could provide value to advertisers.

Unlike many many other bloggers, I did not dive into the ethical debate over Be a Magpie.  I wanted to look at it pragmatically from the capitalistic perspective that if it doesn’t work as advertising then it will go away and the ethical questions will be moot.

The first thing I did when I went to the site was look at the way that it attempts to recruit twitter users. It  has a simple little interface that has a prospective twitter user, plugin their twitter id. Then the Be A Magpie system makes a calculation about how much a twitter user could earn based on their number of followers (audience size) and the number of twitter updates (frequency of broadcast).

Essentially, you can look at this from the perspective of the larger the audience and the more frequent the broadcast the higher the earning potential. 

You see Be a Magpie inserts ad text and/or links into a twitter users twitter stream.  They do this contextually, as they monitor twitter users updates.  If a person talks about Pumpkin Pie a lot, and an advertiser Pumpkin soup wants to advertise something, Be a Magpie will show that there are users that frequently mention the word ‘Pumpkin’.  The system does not have the ability yet to put search words together.  Nor does it have the ability to exclude the word ‘soup’ in conjunction with say ‘soup nazi’.

So based on the equation they return some numbers that show how much a twitter user could earn.  I grabbed some examples of what some very well known twitter users could earn based on Be A Magpie’s estimates:

(For the record, these are estimates of potential earnings.  I doubt any of these users have actually signed up for Be a Magpie.  Several of them have vocally expressed their disinterest for the service based on ethical considerations for their audience that they want to protect so that they can monetize their audience elsewhere…)

What would the twitter user JasonCalcanis Earn through Be a Magpie on Twitter?	What would the twitter user ‘techcrunch’ earn via Be a Magpie?
What would the twitter user scobleizer earn via Be a Magpie?	What would the twitter user waynesutton earn via Be a Magpie?
What would the twitter user chrisbrogan earn on Be A Magpie?	What would the twitter user iJustine earn on Be A Magpie? (note for the record, her tweets are worth more than that!)
What would the twitter user LeoLaporte earn on Be A Magpie? (Leo is probably the ‘biggest’ celebrity in my unscientific study.  The low number estimate, likely hinges on his low number of tweets, vs Scobleizer, the second most popular web celebrity who tweets like mad.)	What would the twitter user problogger earn on Be A Magpie? (For the record, this is the only blogger in this group I actually subscribe to myself, even though I know iJustine through a different social network and have met several of the people in this list from time to time)
Unlike the bloggers above, I also wanted to show some quotes for news organizations with a twitter facing. Maybe if NPR advertised on twitter they could skip a few fund raising drives . . . .	What would the twitter user nytimes earn through Be a Magpie? Ironically, I did feel like this might be a very good application for ‘real’ news organizations looking to monetize their social media experience.  They already have a corporate face to their readers.  They already serve up ads in every form and fashion and their readers don’t care.  If anyone could use this form of ad revenue successfully as a user it should be sites or companies like the NY Times, NPR and CNN.
What would the twitter user cnn earn through Be a Magpie?	What would the twitter user nprnews earn through Be a Magpie?

In my example and trials, I did a $12(approximately) advertising campaign for a satire article (and not a great article at that). 

• I was not trying to sell anything. 
• I was not collecting any names for a marketing list
• I was not trying to get anyone elected
• I had no agenda other than trying to figure out if the service might drive traffic from one website to another.

I used my $12 to order ad placement for the following words to be twittered through someone else’s account on twitter:

“Recycling Beer in Space”

These words were then matched to twitter users on the keywords of space station.  I also included a link to the article Astronauts Tinkle in Urine-to-Water Machine. 

The results I receive showed that my campaign ‘reached 2716 twitter followers’ on day 1 and 633 twitter followers on day 2.  Of those followers 73 people clicked on my link on day 1 and 16 clicked on my link on day 2.

That’s about a 2.6% click thru rate on day 1 and a 2.5% click thru rate on day 2.

My Google analytics account indicated that I had 4 visitors during the same time period that came to my site via twitter.  It could be possible that others came to the site ‘directly’ in some fashion that may have included copying the link or coming in anonymously.

From a publishers perspective this would not appear to be a good arbitrage opportunity for generating interest in a story.  The CPM quotes I received through the system for the words ‘space station’ varied from $3 - $6.

I’ve had some experience with AdWords, and those numbers seemed and felt expensive to me. I might have been willing to pay $0.25 but not $6 nor even $3. 

Essentially $3 is paid to a person that has say 2716 followers, the message goes out through their twitter account and this generates 73 clicks (possibly from the same person 73 times or different people 73 times or any combination in between).

From my perspective using stats that I trust, I paid $12 and got for page views.  :) 

I had a couple small issues when placing the order and afterwards, and have to say that the support was friendly, helpful and accurate.  It was not exactly fast, but I was not expecting miracles for a new site.

My take away(s) from this sample trial include the over notion that the service has potential, but will require a lot of early adopters doing some trial and error advertising campaigns to figure out how to use this to best advantage.

More specifically:

• The price needs to come down for advertisers.  Not every twitterer out there is worth the same amount of CPM.
• Some twitterers will get more response from followers than others and this needs to find its way into the price and roi calculations
• This is not a good way to drive traffic for publisher sites.  If you are running an affiliate campaign landing page or something, and you get the right people to the page it could work as well a Google Adwords campaign, provided the price is fixed.
• The metrics and reports provided were good and useful, although I’d like more information about what they ‘mean’. For example
• what constitutes a click? 
• What did my ad campaign look like when it went live? 
• Which twitter users actually ran my campaign? 
• Update – After I initially published this article I found an area in the service that Identifies the twitter users that published my campaign, I found a link to their individual twitters of my campaign as well.
• The costs for each of these users is shown in the image on the right.
• How many twitter users ran my campaign?
• Update - Also answered in my find post publication.

As a side note, I still can’t confirm that my campaign actually ran.  :)  I tried several twitter search engines including search.twitter.com and came up empty.

Update – Post publication I found the tools to confirm that the campaign ran.  They were under the account tab and not under the campaign stats section.  So this was more of site navigation issue (and user malfunction) than it was a lack of capability.  I also found that I was searching for the wrong keywords, using the title of my campaign and not the actual ad text (its been a long holiday weekend) 

So I think Be A Magpie has potential as a new marketing service.  I think it could generate a successful advertising campaign eventually.  I think therefore that the ethical debate that is on going is a useful conversation to have as this service could have legs, and someone needs to figure out how and when to make it work.

Hopefully my experiments and sample will help make the debate less theoretical and more substantive, and hopefully tiny Tim will turn out OK in the end too. 

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What’s Wrong With ReviewMe’s Advertorial Product?

July 11th, 2007 by admin

ReviewMe recently launched a new blog Marketing tool that promises  to make life easier for bloggers, but did they miss something significant?

How Does ReviewMe’s Advertorial Product Work?

1. An Advertiser writes 250 words about their own product.
2. The advertiser picks the blog that will receive this review and pays the fee.
3. The blogger reviews the advertisers review and accepts it if they like it.
4. The review shows up on the bloggers site.

Pros of ReviewMe’s Advertorial Product

• Blogger doesn’t have to write anything.
• Advertiser controls the message.
• Both advertiser and blogger get to choose whether or not they will play.

Cons of ReviewMe’s Advertorial Product

• Bloggers do not write Review in their own words.
• Potential Duplicate content issues if the advertiser puts the same review on more than one blog.
• Similar to programs where advertisers pay for comments with links in them. (Bloggers in an uproar over this even bloggers that write sponsored articles.)

Moot Points (not good or bad just is)

• Review is called out as a sponsored review
• Advertiser gets to cherry pick blog (can do that any way)
• No idea if this will inspire ReviewMe to come up with a pricing plan that actually drums up business.
• I saw a similar program to this about 4 months ago in a form that enabled bloggers to sell these types of things directly from their blog with no ReviewMe middle man (presumably taking a 50% commission.)
• BloggingAds has the same program already.  $5 gets you the opportunity to drop your article on a blog in your own words.

Making Bloggers Think

The service will definitely make bloggers and Matt Cutts think about the sponsored article industry.  For Matt Cutts this will be one more sign of the evil encroaching on Google’s Web advertising and search monopoly.  (Anything that threatens their monopoly must be bad for business.)

For the blogger elite, this will be yet another example of how the web is going wrong and threatening their kick-back-way of life.

For bloggers they will be confronted again with a new non hypothetical example of how to sell out their blog.  In the magazine world the advertiser provides the advertisement, right?  This is basically an advertisement so everything should be just fine.  Not so fast, even with the disclosure it all goes back to who the reader thinks wrote this article. 

For advertisers, they will need to figure our if they want a review written in their own words on 1 to 100 blogs.  Then they will have to ask themselves if they want their sponsored article next to some other advertisers sponsored article.  Within 2 articles of each other?  5 articles?  10 articles?

What I think

This type of practice is already available in the Blogosphere in the form of guest blogging and ghost writing.  However, before I would take an advertisers pre-written article and put it on my blog, I’d probably just ask the advertiser to send me a quote to buy my blog all together.  If you want to write one, why not all the others?  If you think this type of advertisement will help, why not just go buy 100 domains or 1,000 domains and start up a bunch of your own blogs. 

The answer to that hypothetical is that there is no value in it to an advertiser. The benefit of a sponsored review to an advertiser is the exposure to the audience and the link but also in the perspective of the blogger and the bloggers ability to describe the product or service or article and give it a fresh light.

There is no Buzz in repeating the same words over and over again in 250 word reviews spread through 500 blogs with a cutesie disclosure statement that the readers will interpret as ‘ignore this article at leisure.’

The bottom line is that if you do not mind people dropping spammy comments on your blog (and maybe you don’t) then you probably will not mind advertisers dropping entire articles, unless you have a problem with getting nailed for duplicate content.

 

The Program Description

we are excited to announce our new Advertorial product at ReviewMe!  Advertorials are a huge step forward in the world of paid blog reviews.  Check out the benefits:

For Advertisers:

• You control the message.  Enter up to 250 words including links back to your website and also an image of your choice.

• You can login and get full impression and click tracking on your campaign.

• You choose which top blogs to place your Advertorial.

For Publishers:

• Less work.  Simply cut and paste our code into your blog.

• All advertorials are by default marked as a “SPONSOR POST:” so the disclosure is done for you.

• You retain full control.  Accept or reject any Advertorials purchased.

We think our RM Advertorial will revolutionize the paid blogging world by giving advertisers complete control over their messaging, along with a branding opportunity and the reporting metrics they have come to expect with traditional online media buys.  Bloggers will also benefit from an additional revenue source to supplement ReviewMe’s suite of offerings.  You can view a live Advertorial here.  For more information and to order Advertorials visit ReviewMe!

Thanks,
Patrick Gavin

President

Disclosure - This article does not endorse any of the products or companies listed above.  This author has written 3 articles for the old ReviewMe service, but that was 6 months ago and not on this website.  All the links above have a rel=”nofollo” tag in them with the exception of the link to the blogger uproar which points to a fellow bloggers website and not a company (that I know of.)  The author has not personal issue with blog advertising nor sponsored articles and feels that disclosure is a crock, that Matt Cutts is walking on a dangerous anti-trust line and that TechCrunch is in elitist terms - stupid.

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Bloggerwave Update: Fraud, slow response to PayPal, or is PayPal in the Wrong?

May 26th, 2007 by admin

Update 5-28-07

Yesterday on 5-27-07, I verified with PayPal’s resolution center that Bloggerwave’s account was now safely in good standing. Furthermore, PayPal no longer feels that Bloggerwave’s account was utilized in a fraudulent manner. For more information and clarification on this situation, I’d recommend reading the article I published on the subject yesterday. This update is provided for future readers so that they will be able to view this article in context with a situation and understanding that has evolved over time.

Original Article Here

I’d like to respond to some of the activity and results that have transpired since my first two articles on this subject.

1. Article 1 identified that PayPal had informed me that Bloggerwave was using either a bank account or credit card account fraudulently
2. They took the money in my PayPal account and sent it back to Bloggerwave due to this fraud Issue.
3. They also sent me an email encouraging me to turn Bloggerwave in to the US authorities for fraud. (Which got printed in Article 2)

PayPal first told me about the problem on May 11, shortly after I received my first payment from Bloggerwave on May 8 as I mentioned in the article 1. They requested information from me to prove that I had provided services to Bloggerwave. I believe they also contacted Bloggerwave at the same time, but I can not confirm this.

Eight days later on May 19th, PayPal closed their investigation and reversed Bloggerwave’s payment to me along with several other people, which I learned after publishing articles 1 and 2.

I published article 1 on May 21st (I had attempted to send a message to Bloggerwave on the 20th or 21st, but they only had two contact forms for sales and tech support and neither seemed to fit the situation(I never received a reply from that message).

I did not hear from Bloggerwave until the evening of May 24th, when they commented on article 1. In that comment, they left an email address, and I immediately responded to the email to attempt to open up a dialogue with Bloggerwave through a more direct means than their website contact us form.

Since then I have received 9 emails from Bloggerwave at a rate of about 4 per day.

They indicated that they have had PayPal fix their account and that the account has been fixed since May 24th, 5 days after PayPal reversed the payment transaction and 3 days after PayPal had told me that it was reversed due to fraud.

Now, since receiving Bloggerwave’s comment on my blog and their emails over the last 2 days, I have not had the opportunity to speak with PayPal directly. I have received a replacement payment from Bloggerwave.

I will contact PayPal today to determine if they will actually let me keep this new payment from Bloggerwave and determine if they still find the account to be fraudulent.

Clearing up some loose ends

1. When I spoke with PayPal, the bloggerwave email address had not been verified, I checked. Today, you can check and see that their payment address is now verified. The verification from PayPal shows that the account was created on May 7, but does not indicate when it became verified.
2. I asked PayPal at the time (I mentioned it in article 1) if checking the PayPal verification status would have helped me to avoid doing business with a fraudulent company, if it would have helped prevent receiving a fraudulent payment, if it would have prevented my funds from being reversed. Their answer was “No” it would not help. The verification is just a check, an additional layer of security, but not a fool proof way to protect an account from fruad.

What do I think is going on given the information I have today?
I suspect one of the following possibilities:

1. PayPal could have been correct the first time when they told me that the account did not authorize the transfer from the bank account or credit card to the Bloggerwave PayPal account, which later paid me and several other people.
2. PayPal could have been wrong the entire time
3. Bloggerwave may have not responded in a timely manner to PayPal’s request for additional information following their initial payments. keep in mind they did not set up that payment address until May 7. Maybe someone at Bloggerwave didn’t take the email seriously. Maybe the email went into a spam folder. Maybe they saw the email, but suspect a fraudulent email from PayPal (It could have looked like a boilerplate phishing email for PayPal information).
4. Bloggerwave may have not taken the problem seriously until I wrote my article. I published the article on the 21st and did not hear from Bloggerwave until the 24th. They should have seen the transaction funds going back into their account on May 19th (like I did). I was not the only account to experience reversals, so they should have seen others as well. They did not respond to the contact us from submission that I provided, but they did leave a comment on this blog and at that point, it definitely appears that they got very active about straightening the mess out. (Any actions they took prior to that are not visible to me, maybe they took actions and maybe they did not.)
5. Its possible that the call center representative named Felisa did not know what she was talking about, had bad information in the computer system, or interpreted good or bad information in the computer system incorrectly. When I spoke with her I asked many of these questions over and over again, and I asked for many qualifying and clarifying responses trying to determine if Bloggerwave was involved in or victim of fraudulent activity. Felisa did definitely seem to know what she was talking about. She seemed very intelligent, gave answers that made sense, gave answers that did not contradict each other, and seemed to take the situation very seriously. She also seemed to understand all the implications of what she was telling me. Based on what I know today, I suspect that she was either telling the truth as she knew it at the time with the facts she had at the time, or she is a world class actor. I’ve worked in credit and finance for many years and have wrote many papers on electronic transactions and money laundering. I have studied PayPal since they were created. I knew the right questions to ask when I was on the phone with Felisa and she seemed to know what she was talking about as well. I don’t think she was just some run of the mill telemarketer.

Next Steps
I will call PayPal again to find out if they will let me keep this latest payment. I will share with you the results of what I learn. I will share those results as fast as I can, even though I am travelling (its a holiday here). I’ve been sharing updates as quickly as I can and answering questions offline with many dozens of bloggers. I will continue to do my best with the information I have.

I have received several emails from Bloggerwave that indicate that this situation will probably be cleared up and that Bloggerwave could be OK. However, given the fact that PayPal called out their payments as fraudulent, I do have to be very careful. The burden of proof is now on Bloggerwave to show the world that they are a credible, reliable company.

There were several things about their start up that made many dozens of bloggers question Bloggerwaves integrity. This situation has not helped Bloggerwave. I can not speak to their motives if they are honest or dishonest.

At worst PayPal was originally correct. At best Bloggerwave has been a victim of a mistake by PayPal. Somewhere in between its possible that Bloggerwave was not fully prepared to go live with their online payment system and these problems that developed since May 8th (when I received my first payment and a day after Bloggerwave set up their account) could have been avoided with more rigorous testing and with more timely communication with PayPal and the blogger community.

When I know more, you will know more.

   Blogging Risks, Marketing Company Launch Stories    2 Comments

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