Companies pay you to talk and tweet about them

This post was originally intended for The PR Practitioner.com

Attention companies: Kim Kardashian will tweet about your product for a mere $10,000 (per tweet).

Attention companies: If you provide excellent customer service and I enjoy using your product, I’ll do it for free!

I’ve never used Web sites such as PayPerTweet.com or PayPerPost.com, but it’s more and more evident that others do. I think it’s great that ordinary people and celebrities get paid to endorse products in the online world, but I don’t know if I could ever bring myself to do that. It’s great because it’s an easy way for people to make money, but it’s completely wrong because your tweets/blog posts lack authenticity.

Who are you if you don’t have your own voice? Who are you once people find out your receiving money for your tweets/posts? Do you then become less credible?

I hope everyone who uses these services discloses to their readers/followers that they are reading paid content.

Editor’s Update: In an effort to see what everyone is talking about, I just signed up for ad.ly. If I am chosen to tweet about products (which I doubt I will be), I will fully disclose this AND I plan to do a full blog series on how it changes my Twitter relationships.