This post was inspired by Peter Kafka’s (@pkafka) article on AllThingsD: Twitter’s Free Love Era Comes to an End

Hello Twitter. We at Shortbord have been admirers of yours for quite some time.  We’ve watched you change the way media works by turning every person – from our next door neighbors to the biggest Hollywood stars – into their own personal media companies.  All it takes is a web connection and a few interesting words to say (emphasis on few words), a few links to share, some hard work, and a little bit of luck, and even the little guys and girls out there can become Twitter stars with millions of followers hanging on their every word.

You’ve given popular people the same challenge that popular websites have: to keep posting interesting anecdotes, finding great content, pics and videos in the never ending attempt to grow followers and become bigger celebrities. Until recently, celebs were able to make a little bit of money through their Twitter content distribution channel through services like Ad.ly, SponsoredTweets, MyLikes (just to name a few), but now you have outlawed any 3^rd party service that runs ads through personal profiles with your new TOS.  While we applaud the move to eradicate spam from “the pipes” that connect us, we think that the move bites off your nose to spite your face.  Here’s why:

Shortbord looks at the way people use Twitter, as well as hundreds of other popular social media services ranging from blogs, to social networks and content sharing sites, and realized one interesting thing: web services provide the means, but people provide 100% of the value of social media.  When it comes down to it, Twitter, Facebook, or any other social media app without millions of die-hard users is simply just another web app.  Popular services are successful because loyal users contribute their photos, videos, conversations, relationships, daily anecdotes and valuable time increasing the value of the service to each other and to you – the website owners.  This value has been evident in lofty equity raises, but has seldom turned the corner on cash flow generation for website owners because no sites have yet realized that when people make money for themselves, and websites earn a fraction of each person’s earnings, social media can actually be monetized.

Shortbord enables people (yes – the same people that create ALL of the value of Twitter as well as thousands of others) to make money from having big audiences, just like websites do – with targeted and relevant display ads that don’t interrupt the conversation but even better – enable the individuals to express themselves without saying a word. We do it on any site that has embedded our endorsement badges, and both site owners and people get paid.  Endorsement badges are valuable because people are valuable and endorsements are personal.  My friends, the celebrities I follow, and the industry experts I tune into every day on the web are extremely influential to me and anything they promote is instantly on my radar. Visual, simple, effective.

So Twitter (and every other social app, with lots of users and no clear monetization capability), in our humble opinion, if you want to start monetizing your service and fix social media advertising once and for all, here’s how it should be done:

1)      Let your users make money on your platform. They will rely on your platform even more than they already do

2)      Earn a percentage of each person’s endorsement earnings based on the impressions / clicks of their endorsement badges on your property.  We call it a crowdsourced advertising model – websites with the biggest crowds make the most money

3)      Brands can finally connect directly with their target consumers and stimulate highly influential word-of-mouth endorsement across social spheres – after all, this is the primary goal of advertising right?

To summarize, people are like mini-websites on the social web in that they post content, manage large audiences, and serve millions of impressions and leads on a daily basis.  Let them make money just like websites do, and you’ll no longer have to worry about spammy or inauthentic ad units that steal genuine conversations.  Shortbord Endorsement Badges don’t change a thing, other than to add a new level of expression to each person’s post. Everyone wins through a simple Endorsement Badge.