I am shopping for an eBag thanks to Magpie!

MagpieA few weeks ago, one of my tweets spoke to shopping for a new laptop bag. About a week later, friend Mr. Noobie (a great site for learning about everything) asked how my search for a new bag were coming.

I had to come clean.

I hadn’t actually written the tweet, it was posted by Magpie. Magpie is an advertising medium launched for Twitter. For folks like myself, with a lot of (natural) followers, I wanted to try it to see whether or not there was an opportunity to make a few bucks (research, remember?). Each ad was even preceded with the word “ad:” so I felt it was a pretty transparent service.

Tweet

Today I closed my Magpie account and cashed out for about $75 for the last few months – not bad I suppose. To Magpie’s credit, I didn’t close my account because they did anything wrong… there are no rules in social media!

Rather, I closed it because I had to continuously deny posting of terribly written Tweets day after day. Unlike eBags (or the affiliate who may have been advertising on their behalf) , most of the Tweets that were submitted for my approval were spamaculous specimens of terrible marketing.

The irony, of course, is that I’ll most likely use the $75 to buy a nice laptop bag. I didn’t realize how uncomfortable or terrible my bag (purchased at OfficeMax) was until I opened my eyes to all these cool new bags with extra-wide shoulder straps.

Several of my friends responded to the Tweet and a co-worker even stopped me at work and provided quite a detailed explanation of how he came about buying his carrier bag. I didn’t have the heart to tell him he was responding to an advertisement.

How Magpie could improve:

There are a couple of features in Magpie that could draw me back in:

  • If Magpie simply provided me a link and the sample ad, but allowed me to make edits to the Tweet so it is, indeed, my own. I can write far better than the jokers out there spamming on Magpie.
  • If Magpie offered a show once and out setting. Sometimes I have some regular downtime where I don’t tweet for hours, so when one advertisement follows another advertisement, all my followers were up in arms. I got used to checking for the ad and then declining it soon after to enact my own show once feature.

I wish Magpie good luck! Once again, it’s a very well-written application. I was even allowed to cash out and cancel my account online – something not often seen with any other affiliate program.