Twitter today launched Sponsored Tweets – its first foray into paid advertising. In a Q&A with Forbes.com, Steve Rubel, SVP, Director of Insights for Edelman Digital, details the potential impact of the platform for marketers.

What’s most surprising about Twitter’s Ad platform?

What’s most surprising about the rollout is how conservative it is. It’s clear that Twitter thought a lot about all three of its primary audiences – users, developers and advertisers – and devised a system that seems to respect the needs of all three. They could have been a lot more aggressive by focusing only on display or rich media but they chose a more measured, contextual approach which I think will help them in the long run.

What do you see as the most significant component?

The most significant component is resonance – the nine factors that Twitter will use to measure the performance of the ads. If an ad isn’t performing well across all of these key performance indicators, then the ads will be taken out of rotation. It’s very similar to Google’s model, which has helped the ads maintain a high degree of relevance.

What about it will be most useful to marketers?

The most intriguing aspect of the platform is that it allows businesses to add a degree of permanence to their tweets. This means that they can maintain some degree of visibility, long after they they have floated downstream.

The reason this is significant is that the “destination web era” (where we browse from site to site) is over. Today, more of us are consuming content in stream form. If you’re not in the stream when a tweet hits, you’re likely to miss it. With this new program, advertisers can now pay to get around this – which is significant – and target their tweets accordingly.

Working for a public relations firm, I am particularly intrigued by how Twitter is positioning it as a reputation management service for companies in crisis.

What could Twitter have done better with its ad platform plans?

It’s a bit early to tell, but so far nothing. It might have been better if they opened up the process a bit to developers and power users to weigh in, but I am not seeing any kind of backlash so far. I believe that Twitter’s audience wants to see them monetize in a way that allows them to maintain and grow the platform they love. The trick is to do so in a way where the advertising adds value to the experience and doesn’t get in the way. This seems to hit this nail on the head but time will be the ultimate jury.

What will happen to all the other paid Tweet platforms?

Twitter is at a crossroads right now. It is starting to add some of the features that have allowed some vendors in its ecosystem that filled voids to thrive. The trick for these platforms will be to stay ahead of the game. Ideally, Twitter will open a dialogue with them to give them a sense of the markets they plan to enter and those they plan to avoid so that the ecosystem can build viable business models without having to worry about them being disrupted by the mother ship.

Is there anything about this ad platform that is disruptive either to other social ad platforms or to the way that marketers interact with social consumers?

It’s a bit early to tell how disruptive this will be. It all depends on how well the ads are received by the community and how well they perform. It could potentially create a nice direct response platform that complements other, brand-oriented models like those that have made ads on Facebook and YouTube successful.

And for my own curiosity: do you know anything about pricing?

I don’t right now.

There were hundreds of interactive panels at South by Southwest (SXSW). The session on blogger disclosure and credibility may not have had any fancy prognostications about the future of the real-time web or grand reveals of bold creative insights, but the practical, straightforward guidance on the do’s and don’ts for blogger engagement was among the most important exchanges of the entire conference.

Ever since the FTC unveiled new guidelines for disclosure, there has been a lot of uncertainty about how the guidelines apply to actual engagement activities. For example, it’s clear to everyone that a blogger must disclose if they were given a product, but what about a discount on a product or a service? And where should they disclose: in a sidebar, in the About Us section of their blog, or in each post?

These were just a few of the questions that were asked and answered during the session, both in the room, and by @justicefergie, a representative from the FTC that was answering questions in real-time via Twitter. In fact, it was her online participation which transformed the session from an interesting discussion to an essential conversation, something that @ev and Umair Haque could have learned from during the Twitter keynote a few days later.

There were many people in the room that were tweeting about the discussion. You can find the tweets by searching for the hashtag #bloggercred.

For those who don’t want to wade through the chatter, we’ve pulled together a summary of key learnings drawn from the session:

• FTC regulations have put fear of God in brands and bloggers about how they should disclose their relationships.
• You don’t have to disclose anything if you are just a fan. If you happen to love Toyota (GM is an Edelman client) and write about them, you don’t need to make a special disclosure that you own a Toyota. However, if Toyota gives you a car to use for two weeks, you must disclose this. It is Toyota’s responsibility to tell you that you need to disclose.
• Transparency is key – if you are being paid, you must say that you are being paid. If you are receiving products or services, you must disclose such.
• There is no difference in disclosure for product vs. services vs. coupons or discounts. You must disclose all of them.
• You must disclose somewhere in the post itself. It is not enough to post a blanket disclosure in the About Us section or sidebar of your site. The same applies to tweets. You must disclose in each tweet.
• However, there are popular hashtags for disclosure, which include #paid #ad #spon and #sample.
• You can also disclose your relationship in a creative way. It does not have to be dry standard statement.*

These are just a few of the highlights from the session. If you were there, or have additions, examples or questions, please post them in the comments below.

You can also go directly to the source, and digest the FTC and WOMMA guidance documents on disclosure:

• FTC disclosure page with revised guides and consumer education videos
• WOMMA guide to disclosure

Additionally, you can reach out directly to @justicefergie who provides guidance for the FTC. During the session, she provided direct, actionable answers to questions that were very helpful.

*Completely unnecessary over-disclosure: Toyota is not a client, but my first car was a hand-me-down 1985 two-tone brown Toyota Camry with 170,000 miles on it. The windows wouldn’t go down anymore and the air conditioner didn’t work because of a lightning-induced electrical quirk that mechanics could never figure out, but it was a great car. I just had to reach through the sunroof at the drive-thru so that the kind people of Sonic could hand me my chicken strip basket – a small sacrifice for the joys of Texas toast.

Image credit: Louis Gray

At Edelman, we receive a lot of pitches from bloggers looking to connect with the brands we represent. With some bloggers now making six figures from their blogs, this isn’t going to stop anytime soon, and it’s no surprise that there are now multiple conferences focused on the business of turning blogs profitable.

An article by Jennifer Mendelsohn in tomorrow’s New York Times Style Section (posted online today) profiles Bloggy Boot Camp, a professional blogging seminar targeted to women. Sadly, the article is accompanied by the demeaning headline, “Honey, Don’t Bother Mommy. I’m Too Busy Building My Brand.” Let’s face it: clever articles are accompanied by inappropriate, sensationalist headlines. This is par for the course in the age of Twitter. Unfortunately, both the headline and the tone of the entire piece are somewhat frustrating to me as a woman, an executive and a long time blogger.

I invite you to read the full piece and form your own opinions, but sentences like “bringing together participants for some real-time girly bonding” might very well stop you in your tracks. As I write this, my husband (and fellow Edelman executive Michael Wiley) is at SXSW. Would Mendelsohn classify that experience as macho bonding? Or would she write that he is attending a conference for the purposes of education and networking? Why do people, including Ms. Mendlesohn, continue to refer to networking among women as girly bonding? I seriously doubt the participants at Bloggy Boot Camp were wearing jammies and braiding each other’s hair. However, from the tenor of the piece, it was pretty easy to jump to that conclusion. Tiffany Romero, a co-founder of the conference is described as steering the proceedings “with the good-natured sass of a sorority social chairwoman,” and Mendelsohn notes that Romero went barefoot most of the day. Relevant? I don’t get how.

Moving beyond the sorority party comparisons to the meat of the article, Bloggy Boot Camps are one-day sessions created to educate bloggers on the ins and outs of blogging professionally. I have never attended one of these particular conferences, but I have to wonder what really goes down at one. I think it is terrific that women want to get together to share tips on making their blogs more lucrative and well-read, but I question some of what I am reading here. Were attendees really drinking mimosas out of SIPPY cups? And while I am sure there was time spent covering the basics of how to better utilize Google-friendly keywords, were the attendees doing so only to “get 28,549 views of [their] tutu-making tutorial?” Is that what the “mommy bloggers” are covering these days? I must be really out of the loop.

There are some interesting points made in this article that are buried in all the fluff, and I am going to make the assumption that this one-day seminar was actually quite a bit more useful and rewarding than comes across here. Mendelsohn points out that “bloggers and corporations are still forging the proper boundaries of their relationship, groping through uncharted territory.” This is absolutely true, and the complex nuances of this situation deserve more column space.

As I mentioned, my team gets contacted by a lot of bloggers who want to be sponsored. The ones who resonate are the ones who have a story to tell in a unique way that will make our brands a little more human. Does increased Google traffic help? Sure thing. But content is king. Bloggers should focus on providing interesting and well-written content first, and traffic-making schemes second. I am unclear on whether this was covered at Bloggy Boot Camp.

I am in agreement with Mendolsohn’s point that “mothers often prefer the warts-and-all experiences of other moms online — and the ability to discuss them interactively — to the dry, inflexible pronouncements spouted by experts in books and parenting magazines.” Where I struggle is in how these relationships are frequently described by the press. Is it possible for moms to form bonds online without the accompanying “girly” descriptors? Can we continue to support each other both online and off without the sorority house comparisons? This article tells me we aren’t quite there yet, but one can hope…