The other day, I started unfollowing people who use Magpie. I typically send them a message to let them know I’m planning to unfollow them. If they drop me a note back and have a good discussion, I don’t unfollow them.

Today, @annezieger talked a bit about Magpie, and asked some good questions, which I responded to in tweets, but thought I should go into in much more detail in a blog post.

One question she asked was if that I unfollowed people using Twittad or adjix. I responded saying that I haven’t seen or been annoyed by Twittad or adjix ads, but I have been annoyed by Magpie ads. I went on to comment that Twitter and new advertising is about conversation. Magpie isn’t.

Now that I’m back home and have a little more time to explore, I thought I’d offer my thoughts. I went and checked out Twittad. The way Twittad works is that it changes the background of your twitter page to include one of their advertisements. The reason I’ve never seen it is that I almost never look at people’s twitter pages. I’ve searched out a few twitter pages with Twittad and I don’t find it offensive in the least. I might even consider trying it. However, I like the branding that I have for my twitter page. Very simple. Just the Orient Lodge Red that I use on as many social networks sites as will allow changing backgrounds. Twittad pays you to put up an ad in a non-offensive location. Not bad.

Adjix has another interesting approach. They are a URL shortener, like tinyurl, is.gd and tons of others. Yet when you shorten a URL with them, you have the option of adjix adding a small header bar with their advertisement in it. Again, very unobtrusive. They offer a valuable service, easy URL shortening, with an advertising scheme built in. Very smart. I may try adjix.

Then, there is Magpie. What Magpie does is insert advertisements into the stream of tweats you create, as if the message were coming from you. Good idea, to get people to read the messages. Very dumb idea for anyone to use. Let me come up with an analogy. My twitter stream is like the stream of things that I say at a party. I try to make what I say interesting, well timed, and on topic. Magpie is like if someone said, we’ll pay you if you allow us to hook up a device that at times we think will be effective from a marketing perspective, will take over your mind and have you say what we want you to say.

I’m sorry. I just don’t think that is a good idea. Especially if you have any people that follow you from a cellphone and pay the phone company to get your tweets.

Anne also asked if when e-mail advertising first began, did I drop anyone who did ad blasts. Unfortunately, this doesn’t make a lot of sense. With Twitter, you chose who you follow. On email, you generally don’t chose who can send email to you.

Yeah, in a sense, spam filters give you that ability. You can set up spam filters to discard any email messages from a spammer, and I’ve done that. So, in a sense, I suspect many of us have dropped emailers that send spammy ad blasts.

Another interesting and more general difference between Anne and I on twitter is the question of who the ‘leading lights’ are. She wrote, “Can’t a group of the leading lights get together for a position statement on this stuff?” I responded that there are over half a million leading lights. She responded, “I know there are many, but let’s be honest, a few stand out...”

I suspect this is where we have a fundamental difference. I’m all about the long tail and stuff like that. I think each of the half a million non A list tweeters are just as important as any of the A list tweeters. Let’s take @vinu for instance. @vinu is currently followed by just over a thousand people. Twitter Grader ranks him at the 99.5 percentile, with an overall rank of 2,416. Yet for a brief period, I would suggest that he was one of the most important members of the Twitter community. Why? He was on the ground in Mumbai and providing some of the best coverage there was of the terrorism there.

This also gets back to ads as part of a conversation. If someone were to come up with a pay per post type model for twitter advertising where they would post tweets about a product or brand they liked, and then engage in a conversation, that would be much better than Magpie sending stuff the person hasn’t written.

As an example, I follow @ripple6. It is the twitter stream of a company of social media marketers. I follow them because I get useful information from them. They were taken over by Gannet, and I wrote about this in a blog post about the future of the newspaper industry. They linked back to that article. They get the aspect of twitter and other social media as a conversation.

Anne asks if I think there is room for “Hi, here I am!” type ads in a twitter stream if they are done well. I actually think there is, providing it is the person saying, “Hi, here I am, and I represent brand X”, or something like that. We can tweet them back. We can see how they follow up.

Perhaps this gets to some of why Anne and I disagree about Motrin Moms. My wife and I both found the ad offensive. We could get into a long discussion about why we felt the ad was offensive, but that misses the point. Some people will find ads offensive, others won’t. Yet returning to the virtual living room, if you offend a bunch of people, you apologize. You get into a discussion about what was offensive, how you’re trying to understand, and how you’ll try not to be offensive again.

I tried to bring the folks into a conversation. I sent emails to various VPs of marketing at McNeil Consumer Healthcare dealing with Motrin. I explained my background as a blogger that writes about marketing, and my coverage of shows like ad:tech and OMMA. I provided a bunch of questions about their perspective on what had happened. I explained that I wasn’t under deadline and they should feel free to take their time, but I would appreciate some feedback. I received acknowledgement receipts that they had read the emails and nothing more. Sure, I could have followed up with older media like the telephone, but that just illustrates the point. They’re broadcasting, but not interacting in new media.

(For those of you who missed it, here is my parody of the Motrin Ad. I whipped it together in around half an hour on my laptop, so the production quality is poor, but that perhaps underlines the message.)

So, those are my thoughts on this cold damp Sunday evening. Anyone want to join the conversation?