Pay Per Tweet Scandal in U.S. = Secret Sponsor Deal in U.K.

Thanks to first-rate investigative work by Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb, we now know that companies including Apple, Skype, Flip, StubHub and Box.net have started paying Twitter users to hawk their products.

Yuck! It's all part of an effort to monetize the fastest-growing online phenomenon since, well, since the web was born. It works like this: Twitter's new new pay-per-tweet feature comes via Magpie, a German company that empowers Twitter users to place ads within their Tweets.

By searching BackTweets, Kirkpatrick shows you can unveil who is buying and who is displaying these fake ads on the micro-blogging servivce. He names names.

As does my Bnet colleague Erik Sherman, who notes today in his take on this breaking scandal that this kind of shady marketing campaign -- quietly paying people to shill for your products -- could prove damaging to brands like Apple's, which have long maintained that there are real people who actually love Macs, iPhones, iPods, and the like. So, what if it emerges that Apple has secretly been paying off its online evangelists all along?

I would only add that this scandal may also undermine Twitter's fresh young brand, and quickly. The service is growing because people trust it is a viral tool connecting real people with other real people. But I, for one, will cut loose anyone I have been "following" just as soon as I catch a whiff that they are secretly promoting products.

(Simply implementing the kinds of disclosures journalists routinely provide whenever we have a real or perceived conflict of interest would be an easy, and obvious solution for these Twitterers, of course.)
Expect further investigations into all of this.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, a similar disturbing scandal has emerged via a blogger named Rachel Money, who is a freelance journalist based in Scotland.
In a post written for Wordtracker.com, a site established 12 years ago to answering the simple, yet complex question of "What are people searching for on the Web?" Money worries that "in the UK that there are some national newspaper journalists who are using rather unscrupulous methods to get links for cash."

Following her link, which clearly was not paid for, one comes to Daniel McSkelly, reporting on a search markting blog, that a search marketer told him they had given a journalist £15,000 ($22,000) in return for links."

Quoting McSkelly, "I think it's interesting that some UK journos are getting wise to the commercial value of links, though it will worry anyone who cares about the integrity of the press that these deals are being done under the table. The resulting links were embedded into editorial copy with no hint that the link is there for commercial gain - In traditional media this kind of deal would strictly appear as 'advertorial' or a 'sponsored feature, which is the way it has to be unless we're to lose faith in our press entirely."

Double Yuck! This is turning into a really bad way to start my weekend!

It's time to dust off those ethics courses, professors. It appears that some unscrupulous operators out there will gladly sell their souls just to earn a little on the side. The best way to combat this trend is to spread the work by Kirkpatrick and McSkelly far and wide, because the kind of abuses they are exposing cannot survive the bright light of sunshine that investigative reporters provide.

(Note from DW, as of 11:30 am pst April 11th: This post has been updated to note that Magpie is not part of Twitter but is a separate company that bills tself as an "Ad network for Twitter.")