Selling products for the price of a tweet

We’ve noted on numerous occasions the fact that traditional advertising can no longer hold a candle to promotion via social media—see New Zealand’s Pass It On initiative for one recent example. Aiming to make the value of such social endorsements explicit, Pay with a Tweet is a platform that lets content owners sell their goods in exchange for a single tweet rather than cash. Developed by German-American Innovative Thunder, Pay with a Tweet bills itself as “the first social payment system where people pay with the value of their social network.” In other words, rather than paying with currency, purchasers of any kind of content tell their friends on Twitter about it instead. Interested content owners simply sign up with Pay with a Tweet, including the download URL, the tweet to be posted and a link to their company’s website. Purchasers, then, follow a “forced viral” model to promote the product in question far and wide. Pay with a Tweet is currently available for testing on Innovative Thunder’s own book, “Oh My God What Happened and What Should I Do?” Traditional advertising’s impact has been fading for some time now, but this is one of the first attempts we’ve seen to make social media’s value explicit. Content creators the world over: one to try out on your own latest work? (Related: Free products for bloggers at invitation-only events — Travel company gives bloggers free trips — Connecting restaurants and bloggers for ‘tastecasting’ via Twitter.)