With this new spotlight has come both positive and negative attention. On the positive side, people seem hopeful in having a way to monetize their labors of love. On the negative side we’ve seen some bad behavior from both publishers and advertisers.

With this in mind we’ve put together some new guidelines and made a few changes to the site. What does this mean for you?

For advertisers:

1. There are no refunds for tweets containing hate language, profanity, adult content, or illegal content.
2. Tweets paid by PayPal eChecks will not be posted immediately. They will be tweeted at the discretion of the publisher:
3. Tweets cannot be purchased until you have verified your Pay4Tweet account by clicking the link in your signup email.

For publishers:

1. If you a delete a tweet that an advertiser has paid for without proper cause, Pay4Tweet will repost it on your timeline.
2. If you delete it again without proper cause, your Twitter feed will be removed from our growing list of 2000+ active Twitter publishers.
3. By month’s end, there will be a 10% fee for purchased ads, which compares well to the 25% for BuySellAds.com, 35% for many affiliate marketing companies, and the staggering 95% differential between Google’s Adwords and Adsense click prices.

During the end of last week, many of Pay4Tweet’s publishers fell victim to a user who thought it might be a good idea to game the system buying ads with PayPal echecks and through other methods.

To prevent this from happening again, this past weekend, we shut down the site and redeveloped our PayPal transaction engine. As mentioned above, eChecks, will no longer automatically generate a tweet, and we do not recommend that you use them.

To help resolve disputes we’ve created a more robust way for you to view the tweets that you have bought and sold with the new Pay4Tweet My Tweets and Pay4Tweet My Sales pages. Here, you’ll be able to reference your tweets in a much more orderly fashion, and it will make it a lot easier for us to help you resolve any disputes you may have.

Additionally, you can now search through the text of the tweets that you’ve bought and sold, as well as search through the Twitter accounts that you’ve bought and sold from.

Our hope is that we can continue to make a safe and fair environment that people can make a little money with. Or a lot.

For those of you that experienced last weeks problems, rest assured that we’ve done a lot a work to keep anything like that from happening again, and we hope that you continue to use the site. With that, go make some money.

-Mo

And so, I built it, and sent it out into the world to make a name for itself. The site’s concept was fundamentally simple. Publisher’s set a price to allow people to tweet. Advertisers pay that price and submit their tweet through the publisher’s channel. However, after reading this Gawker article, I realized that maybe the site is a little too simple. It also created a surge in customer service requests. As a developer with a full-time day job, making the time to respond to questions and modify the site isn’t the easiest thing to do.

For two years the service has been completely free for anyone to use. Compare that to similar services that charge 20%-50% for ad brokering.  Google is making a killing with about a 95% spread between Adsense payouts and Adwords prices, but that’s another story. The thought of hijacking someone else’s hard-earned transaction for 1/3 of the transaction value felt bad when I had to pay. I’d like to not have anyone else feel that same kind of disappointment.

So, Pay4Tweet will now be making some minor changes to help me keep my house payments up, college tuition payments for my oldest daughter, and pay for the site itself. As well, I’m hoping these changes will ensure a positive outlook for Pay4Tweet users in the future.

Starting in late February, Pay4Tweet will begin extracting a nominal fee of 10% for ads placed. This would be a fee that publishers would pay in addition to their normal PayPal transaction fees. The price that Twitter publishers quote, would be what an advertiser would pay. In this way, any negative experience an advertiser might have as a result of seeing an extra fee tacked onto their purchase would be avoided.

Effective immediately, you’ll need a Pay4Tweet account in order to buy an ad. Also, we will be communicating with PayPal to not authorize any refunds for tweets containing hate language, profanity, or adult material. So, if anyone chooses to throw trash into the Twitter ecosystem Pay4Tweet will have a better chance of identifying repeat offenders to PayPal.

Effective immediately, all tweets from Pay4Tweet will be prefixed with the text ‘AD:’. This was supposed to be in place a long time ago. Now that the site is getting a lot more usage, getting this fix in was a no-brainer.

Overall, I would like Pay4Tweet to enable positive relationships between buyers, sellers, and the Twitter community in general. I’d also like to make sure that advertisers and publishers feel that they are getting a fair value and are being treated fairly. Hopefully, these changes will help in creating the type of environment we’d all like to be a part of.

-Mo

Use Pay4Tweet’s Twitter Plugin to:

1. Turn your Twitter account into a revenue-generating text ad source for your web site or blog, and display as few or as many ads as you’d like.
2. Create a dynamic community by allowing only YOUR followers to have their tweets appear in your embedded Twitter stream.
3. Place your Tweets, or tweets from any search term, into your website so that they look like they are seamlessly integrated into your design

Text Ads

You’re probably familiar with Google’s AdSense text ads.  They’re a great way to create revenue for your web site, but for a potential advertiser that likes your content and wants to place their ad immediately, Adsense creates a lot of barriers.  Have you ever tried placing an ad on a site that you like using Google Adsense?  Good luck.

After looking at the different solutions available, I couldn’t find anyone offering a way to buy text ads directly from a publisher.  And, buying one for a specific article is pretty much near impossible.  Text ads, as you might infer from the success of the search engine marketing industry, are just as effective as display ads.  They can appear more editorial in nature and can look more like a natural part of a site than display ads.

If you would like to have text ads on your web site, here’s what you need to do.

1. Download and install the simple snippet of code into your web site
2. Set your design preferences.  Plugin installation complete. Whew!
3. Create a Pay4Tweet account  and add your Twitter account.
4. Set the price for your Twitter account to get your payment link.
5. Add your payment link for the plugin’s pay4TweetAdLink parameter.  Done!

Remember that you can use any Twitter account that you own.  If you don’t want to have ads in your main Twitter account, create a new one dedicated to advertising.  Since they’ll be used for advertisements on your website, this might actually be a better way to go.

If you’d like to start earning extra cash now, download the jQuery-based Pay4Tweet plugin here, and sign up for a Pay4Tweet account today.

Community Building

The Pay4Tweet plugin can also help you organically build your Twitter following by allowing ONLY YOUR FOLLOWERS the ability to discuss issues on your web page. Even with all of the communication methods made possible by the internet there are still a lot of barriers to it.  Have you ever tried communicating with your favorite blogger through a comments form that buries your statement way at the bottom of the page. Or worse, buried within several pages of comments?  I have.  The problem with just letting anyone post a message, though, is spam.  How do you stop it?

Pay4Tweet’s jQuery-based plugin solves both problems.  First, it has a flexible design that allows it to be placed anywhere in a web page (not just at the bottom). Second, it uses your Pay4Tweet account to find your followers and allows you to filter them by their number of followers, and by specific search terms. It also allows you to block bad users with Twitter’s own “blocking” capabilities.

How do you use this feature?

1. Download and install the snippet of code for your web site.
2. Set your design preferences. Plugin installation complete. Whew!
3. Create a Pay4Tweet account and add your Twitter account.
4. Set the plugin’s stream parameter to “followers” and the query parameter to whatever. Done!

New visitors to your site will have to follow you on Twitter in order to be part of the conversation, which will help you organically grow your number of followers.  But, what’s most important is that you’ve given a public voice to the most important people on the web YOUR VIEWERS.

If you’d like to start organically growing your Twitter following, download the jQuery-based Pay4Tweet plugin here, and sign up for a Pay4Tweet account today.

Design

A website that’s constantly being refreshed with new content is good for search engine optimization, credibility, and can make your site look better if done right.  Have you ever been to a web site where the content never changes?  Or, let’s turn it around, do you have a hard time keeping the content fresh on your site?

I do.  It’s hard work keeping content fresh with original copy or by researching stuff that I can link back to for my site visitors.  What if you didn’t have to do all that work on your own?  By installing Pay4Tweet’s jQuery-based Twitter plugin, you get an unbranded feed that you can customize to your heart’s content.  So, not only can you get a stream of new content pumping in from the new tweets pouring in from whatever topic is trending on Twitter, you can make it look like it’s an integral part of your site with the plugin’s customization features.

A few of these include:

1. Automatic content refreshing over a time specified by you.
2. Plugin width.
3. Text and anchor tag sizes and colors.
4. Removing text elements (links, headers,  thumbnails, etc.) that you don’t want.
5. Changing and removing DIV padding and borders.

Design is an important aspect for any web site, and this plugin allows you to be the best judge of what looks right for your site’s visitors.  But, of course, you can always stick with the basic styling, and still have polished and professional look.

If you’d like to spice up the interaction on your website with constantly updating, fresh and formatted new content, download the jQuery-based Pay4Tweet Twitter plugin here, and sign up for a Pay4Tweet account today.

I’m sure this probably got a lot of press at one time, but as someone who has only been using and developing on Twitter for a little over a year, I missed it.

The story captures the phoenix like transformation of a group of Odeo employees into the founders of one of today’s biggest social media icons, Twitter. Dom’s book, 140 Characters, goes into more detail about the history, but does not have the luxury of hyperlink references.  Sorry paper.

As a Twitter fan, it’s cool having the insight into how it all came about.  Just like “Pirates of Silicon Valley”, the made-for-TV movie about the beginning of Apple and Microsoft (based on the book “Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer”), I’m sure this post will have the same geeky historical significance in 20 years.

Google has quietly invited a handful of advertisers to test a new display-ad integration with Twitter.

Although Google has no comment on the matter, the article states that Norwegian firm Qualité Search Marketing was asked to join the beta test on May 7th.

The description of how it works is a little confusing, but it seems that the ad unit contains tweets from the advertiser’s stream.  It’s a great concept, especially since it’s close to the direction we’re going at Pay4Tweet.

Good luck Google, but don’t get in our way. 

Last week a friend of mine recommended Zappos Co-Founder Tony Hsieh’s book Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (sounds more like a Tony Robbin’s CD set).  This friend said that he used to manage the merchant processing for Tony Hsieh’s restaurant in San Francisco, and thought that, as an entrepreneur, I might appreciate the story.

So, I picked up the book and started reading.  After getting through the first third of the book I found out that Tony Hsieh would be speaking at the Commonwealth Club in downtown San Francisco, so I tweeted it.

@moluv1: Just got my ticket to see Tony Hsieh (Zappos) speak at the SF Commonwealth club on Thursday. this should be good. #luv

I didn’t think much about, but then I got an immediate response from the Zappos service Twitter account:

@Zappos_Service: @moluv1 Enjoy to presentation. It will be great!

Huh? Who does that? So, I responded. I was more curious to find out if they were still listening or if their response was just  a one time thing.

@moluv1: @Zappos_Service I hope so. My wife (@shabnamdancer) loves you guys, which is one of the reasons I bought Tony’s book. #luv

And their immediate response back.

@Zappos_Service: @moluv1 Sweet! be sure to us know how it goes :}

You’ve got to be kidding me?  Needless to say, I finished the book.  And yesterday I went to Tony’s presentation/interview that was moderated by the Wall Street Journal’s Geoffrey Fowler (@geoffreyfowler).

So, from reading the book, and watching the presentation, here are 5 insights I gained that makes Zappos customer service such a positive anomoly.

1. Customer service is a marketing expense.

In “Delivering Happiness” Hsieh explains that by spending money on expenses related to generating great brand experiences you actually create a brand.  This is in contrast to using the same dollars to tell people what your brand is through traditional offline and online marketing.  Typically, corporate leadership and marketing agencies define the brand and tell us what it is.  It seems the Zappos way has the brand defined by our experience with it.

2. The telephone is one of their most important branding tools.

Hsieh believes that a big part of the Zappos experience happens over the phone.  In his words, “We don’t really take that many orders over the phone … but every day they create thousands of great customer service stories.”  In the book Hsieh talks about having each employee improve something really small every day.  A 1% improvement every day leads to a yearly improvement of 37 times (not 37%, but 3700%).  So, each of those great individual phone calls add up.

3. 10 Core Values

Zappos has 10 Core Values that include the following:

1. Deliver Wow Through Service
2. Embrace And Drive Change
3. Create Fun And A Little Weirdness
4. Be Adventurous, Creative And Open-Minded
5. Pursue Growth and Learning
6. Build Open and Honest Relationships with Communication
7. Build A Positive Team And Family Spirit
8. Do More With less
9. Be Passionate And Determined
10. Be Humble

The core values themselves are not as important as the fact that they have them in the first place, and worked as a team to define them for the entire company.  The act of formalizing the core values also helps focus the company (or any company – Hsieh believes) and helps define a culture that will eventually help define the brand and brand experience.

4. Company culture defines the brand

In Hsieh’s book, he outlines the importance of company culture, and, in fact, strongly believes the culture created at Zappos is where they have a distinct advantage over their competition.  Clothing retail is not an easy business, online or offline, otherwise anyone could do it.  According to Hsieh though, by having a culture that rewards customer service and instilling their core principles in every facet of their business, every roadblock that they overcome becomes a new advantage they have over their competition.  And, once again, the learnings from all of these little victories begin to add up to an unrivaled customer experience that would be difficult for their competitors to emulate, and experience that customers will recognize as a distinctly Zappos experience.

5. Zappos offers new recruits $3000 NOT to work there

Talk about putting your money where your mouth is.  Within the first four weeks of an employees hire, that person has the option of taking $3000, plus their pay, to leave if they don’t think the company will be a good fit. This accomplishes two things. First, people who are only incented by immediate financial gain (rather than being motivated by the company’s core values) will leave.  Second, those who stay think very hard about why they’re staying, and typically come to work energized after realizing that their job is more valuable than the quick 3 Gs.  These motivated employees are the ones that answer calls, emails, and tweets from you and me.

So, what does Zappos have to do with Pay4Tweet and selling Twitter Ads?  Absolutely nothing.  In fact, only time will tell how sustainable their model will be. But, it’s working well for Zappos and their customers so far though, and it’s a great example for Pay4Tweet to emulate.

(video by http://www.thesoundwright.com)

When someone says “Twitter Advertising”, people immediately visualize unwanted ads in their Twitter feeds, or embedded in their favorite tweet streams. I visualize a framework for embedding relevant text ads into web pages that have the fortunate benefit of also being time-sensitive.

If I’m a restaurant owner and there’s a blog post about a street festival next weekend, it would be great if I could post an ad there with specials for the event’s attendees.  Or, if a local blogger writes an article about furniture deals in the area, and I want to sell my designer futon frame, having ad inventory ready for impulse sellers would be a great fit.

Although Pay4Tweet would enable transactions to happen directly on someone’s Twitter page, the future of social advertising will more likely (and probably more effectively) be related to the already common text ad.  Where Google currently dominates the text ad landscape, ad hoc networks and individual publishers will have the opportunity to create customizable ad units made up of content that’s even more relevant because they have to take timing more into consideration.

To this end Pay4Tweet will be providing scripts to make this possible.  Check out Moluv.com , or BPOilSpillCleanup.com (for a more philanthropic direction) to see how a Twitter ad doesn’t have to be invasive to your Twitter stream.  A dedicated Twitter page for ads and marketing works just as well, and having that content be presented in a web site removes it even further from affecting the normal daily viewing routines of Twitter users.

Today, marketing on Twitter largely involves embedding ads that may or may not be welcome, but tomorrow, it will be much more than that.

Instead of explaining what Twitter is, showing what it is can be a lot easier when you have a video or a chart produced by someone with skill. I’ve added source references where I can find them (which seem to be missing in a lot of infographics compilations), so that you can more easily do research on your own.  Without further explanation … from me … here’s what Twitter is.

Twitter in Plain English

Twitter infographics and visualizations can come in a lot of formats.  In this post we’ll cover static images, but also the often overlooked visualizations provided by video.  Also, because Twitter is all about sharing and being social, some of the infographics and media will cover other social platforms.

1. Twitter on Paper

One of the most recent, and arguably most attractive, data representations is the image created by Gerardo Obieta (@gobieta) using stats announced at Twitter’s 2010 Chirp conference that I found at Ask Aaron Lee.

2. The Path to 10 Billion Tweets

Another image created earlier this year (pre-Chirp) was this one created by Muhammed Saleem (@msaleem) for a Mashable Article with the same title.

A timeline of tweet volume with some additional charts

3. Twitter Stats

Writer/Designer David McCandless (@infobeautiful) curates the Information is Beautiful website, which is the source of three of the designs in this post.  The Twitter Stats image highlights the behavior of Twitter users using by representing 100 people icons as 1% of Twitter users.

Behavioral representation of Twitter users

4. Chicks Rule!

Another Information is Beautiful blog post and graphic by David McCandless.  Although this isn’t exclusively about Twitter, it shows how the social media juggernaut fits in with other genre sites with respect to gender balance.  If you didn’t get it from the title, women tend to dominate the social media world.

Women are more common on almost every social networking site

5. The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions

The last of the three great diagrams found at Information is Beautiful.  As with the previous one, this one shows how Twitter fits in the world of digital distractions.  Twitter slides into every nook of the food chain below the iPhone, Digital Failure, and Spouse/Partner in this humorous representation.

Twitter fits just below the iphone, digital failure, and spouse/partner interruption

6. The Google Buzz Privacy Fix

In February, Fast Company’s “Infographic: How Google Quashed Privacy Concerns Over Google Buzz” article featured the talent of Bryan Connor (@bryanconnor). His graphic mirrors the conclusions of Fast Company writer Cliff Kuang by showing the correlation of negative sentiment about privacy (as measured by Twitter activity) falling as Google acted with development fixes.

Tweet activity helps measure positive and negative response

7. Information Creation & Circulation Before and After Twitter

Samuel Degremont of global PR agency Burson-Marseller speculates in an article titled “Are sensational topics the only way for journalism to face Twitter’s success?” that the “news” as crowdsourced through Twitter is becoming more relevant, although more focused on sensational topics rather than serious ones.  I don’t necessarily agree, but Degremont’s images of how news was distributed before Twitter and today are eye-opening.

How news used to work

How news works today

8. Facebook vs. Twitter

Having knocked out MySpace to take the social networking heavyweight title, Facebook stands alone as the king of the heap.  But, talented up-and-comer Twitter has thoughts of its own in this Flickr infographic that demonstrates how the two match up.

Two social media giants compared

9.  Cosmic 140: The 140 Most Influential Twitter Users

The first of two highly detailed and data intensive infographics from the geniuses at Information Architects (@ia).  The Cosmic 140 map shows the name, handle, category, influence, and activity of the world’s top Twitterers along with when they started and their first post.  It graphically represents their sphere and areas of influence.

The 140 Most Influential Twitter Users

10. Web Trend Map 4: The State of the Web Mapped onto Tokyo’s Metro System

The second graphic from Information Architect’s creators Oliver Reichenstein (@ia) and Chris Lüscher (@iA_Chris).  This visualization was so popular that they gave it it’s own Twitter page (@webtrendmap).  Like a few of the previous images, Twitter is only presented as a member of a larger ecosystem.  You can find it along the train tracks and at the end point of the purple line.

The State of the Web Mapped onto Tokyo's Metro Line

11. Twitter Facts and Figures

A tall and comprehensive graphic that rivals all the others in this list in the amount of data presented.  The image was created for the blog of SiteImpulse (@siteimpulse)-managed company Website-Monitoring.com.

A Twitter timeline

12. Twitter Territory: How States Compare to the Average U.S. Twitter Grade

Hubspot (@hubspot) is a great resource for social media marketing and the Twitter Territory diagram helps demonstrate why.  Using information collected via their twitter.grader.com tool, Hubspot was able to create this display of Twitter grades (i.e. influence) as an aggregrated score per state across the U.S.

How States Compare to the Average Twitter Grade

13. If You Printed Twitter…

Originally popularized by this Huffington Post article (@huffingtonpost), and created by the onlin ink cartridge store CartridgeSave (@cartridgesave) the super tall image shows how much paper we save by not writing down tweets.

Tweets would fill up a lot of paper

14. What Color is Twitter

About a month ago Mashable (@mashable) writer Josh Catone (@catone) posted this infographic that answers a very design-oriented question.  The image was produced by Infochimps (@infochimps), a massive source of Twitter data.

Twitter is mostly Twitter blue

15. IS Parade

The ISparade.jp web site produces a real-time 3D rendering of Twitter users and search terms (oddly, I couldn’t find a Twitter page for them).  Instead of a graphic, though, here’s a YouTube video showing the results of a parade generated by the term “labnol”.

16. State of the Internet

This video, produced by JESS3 (@jess3), shows some interesting data about internet usage and popular sites.  Twitter, of course, has a little section starting at about 1:10.

17. Just Landed

According to his Twitter bio, Jer Thorp (@blprnt) is a software artist, writer, and educator.  It probably took a lot of each of those skills to produce this animation.  Thorp took the phrase “Just landed” and matched the destination mentioned to the Twitter author’s base location to produce this interesting video.

18. South by SouthWest (SXSW) Vicarious.ly Visualization

Geo-data company SimpleGeo (@SimpleGeo) took data from a number of social media sources to produce this video of tweets and other message sources by location in the Austin area during this year’s SXSW festival.  The experience was well captured in this VizThink (@VizThink) blog post titled “The Ebb & Flow of South by Southwest“.

This article was written by Pay4Tweet (@pay4tweet)  founder and Moluv.com (@moluv00) editor Maurice Wright (@moluv1).