robinjp / Robin J Phillips

Uh oh, there's an ad in my Twitter soup

Chris Geidner, @chrisgeidner, a lawyer who writes at Law, points out that The Washington Post has started slipping ads into its Twitter stream.

This is how the ad looked on its @postpolitics site.

The good news is that it is clearly marked as a "Featured ad". There's no bait-and-switch here. They aren't teazing us with a headline that links to an ad.

That makes me wonder how useful they will be to the advertiser. Not sure if I'll ever click on a link that says "Featured advertiser" and I know I'd never click on one that says "Pheedo: Pioneering rss advertising solutions" which is the page to which last night's ad tweet was linking.

There is nothing new in the game of slipping advertising in to look like editorial content. Some of the ugliest ads in newspapers are designed to look like little stories. But there are rules to keep the ad and marketing staffs honest. Ads need to be clearly marked as ads.

Otherwise you water down the content. And that's the biggest issue here. Twitter feeds are already full of self-promotion. I plan to Tweet this blog as soon as I finish it. We all Tweet things we are interested in, work we have done, stories we've written or photos taken.

But that's what our followers sign up for... and why they stick around. They like what we have to say.

But I don't follow news Twitter sites for the ads. If the ads water down the content, followers will flee. It'll be interesting to get an honest look at how many people actually click on those Twitter ads.

Hate to stand up here frightened on top of this slippery slope, but I think the best thing I can say about The Post's ads is thank goodness they are clearly marked.

Filed under // #journchat advertising The Washington Post Twitter

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Uh oh, there's an ad in my Twitter soup