You (or your favorite charity) can make money from your tweets! Participate in an experiment on making money from influence

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You (or your favorite charity) can benefit from your influence! To find out how, read on…

One of the key themes of Future of Influence Summit, on next week in San Francisco and Sydney, is ‘business models for influence and reputation’.

There are many angles to this particular topic, including:

* Will it be possible for individuals to effectively monetize their influence and reputation?

* What new mechanisms will allow people to make money from the influence?

* How will influence intersect with spending on advertising? (some of the leading players in this space will be speaking at the Summit)

* What are business models for the measurement of influence and reputation?

I recently wrote about Sponsored Tweets, which is one of a number of platforms for people to make money by tweeting sponsored messages and links. There has been extensive discussion on this concept, with a high level of polarization in the community as to whether or not this is a good idea (see for example the comments on Mashable, and thoughts from David Risley, White Hat Crew, and AdWeek).

In the spirit of experimentation and learning how paid influence may work, we are introducing a rewarded tweeting system for promoting Future of Influence Summit. Here is how it works:

1. People using an approved discount code get 25% off the full price of registration (US$199 in San Francisco, A$600 in Sydney). For any registrations with that code, an additional 5% of the registration fee (US$10 for US, A$30 for Australia) is paid to you (or your favourite charity).

2. Email us at influence [AT] theinsightexchange [DOT] com to request a discount code. For any registrations with this code we will pay any amounts due directly to you, or to the charity of your choice.

3. If you prefer, you can promote the discount code CHARITY, which will also give a 25% discount to registrants and have 5% paid to a pool that will be paid out after the event. All of those who have promoted that code will be asked to vote on which charity will be the beneficiary of the rewards.

4. You CANNOT register with your own discount code – you can only use someone else’s.

If you will be personally paid from this promotion, we urge you to disclose that you have a financial interest. This can be done in a variety of ways, for example by linking to this post or including words such as “#ad” or “$” in the tweet (if you are promoting it on Twitter).

I will shortly write in more detail about disclosure mechanisms for sponsored tweeting.

However we do not mandate disclosure. This is part of the experiment, in seeing how twitterers and the audience respond. (Note that the Federal Trade Commission has set recently guidelines for promoting products on blogs and social media.)

We’ll report on what we discover.

The topic of the future of paid influence and business models for influencers, corporate marketers, and advertisers will be addressed at Future of Influence Summit – this issue is rapidly moving to the fore.