UPDATE: On August 26, in advance of Hurricane Irene, Twitter began verifying for a new reason, as evidenced by this tweet: 

Summary: To get a verified account “cheaply”…wait for Twitter to announce their self-service advertising option. Also, please realize: I’m not verified, not a Twitter partner, don’t work for Twitter, don’t run Twitter ads. To sign up today, you’ll need to commit to spend a minimum of $5,000/month for three months: a total of $15,000.

Twitter says that their “…verified accounts program is currently closed to the public” and that they are “not able to accept public requests for verification.” But, they leave a loophole:

“If you’re one of our partners or advertisers, please follow up with your account manager for details.”

That is, for example, how @CharlieSheen got verified so fast: His people worked through Twitter partner ad.ly. Edit: Sean Garret of Twitter says this is not specifically true about Sheen, although Gullov-Singh (@Arnie) of ad.ly was directly quoted saying:

“…we got [Sheen] verified through Twitter….We know a bunch of people at Twitter, and we reached out to them…”

I’ve reached out to both for clarification. Hat tip to @Kim for drawing my attention to this.

Can you buy a verified account?

Yes and no. Signing up for one of Twitter’s ad programs costs a minimum of $15,000, and buying ads from Twitter may give you the option to get verified too.

But Twitter plans to offer self-serve advertising later this year, and there may be an advertising amount offered that will fit into smaller budgets—with the benefit of becoming verified for some, in some cases.

Verified accounts that aren’t very popular—some with as little as 1,373 followers, as @nwjerseyliz points out, are likely through organizations that advertise with Twitter or work with Twitter partners, or they got in back when the system was public, and they were public or semi-public figures that had problems with impersonation.

What else can you do?

Realize that even in the past, they mostly only verified public accounts that were in danger of impersonation (“accounts who deal with identity confusion regularly”), so they are unlikely to make verification ever available simply by a request accompanied by proof.

If you have an official website, link to your Twitter profile from it—it’s the easiest way to prove your identity to followers. Don’t put fake “Verified” symbols on your background or in your username, such as “verified ✔”—it just looks lame. Real verified accounts will look like this:

Why Wasn’t My Account Verified?

The official word from Twitter is here.

Special features of verified accounts

On July 4, Twitter began allowing Verified Accounts the option to receive DMs from ANY follower. and in January 2012 they began distributing verified account information to third party apps.

Show us trends by topic

There are tweets about the latest trend for almost any topic you can imagine. Twitter should let you choose which kind of topic trends you want information about, from general, such as Fashion or Tech, to more specific, such as iPhone development or US Political news. Then they monetize by showing us ads relevant to those trends…with general ads mixed in as necessary.

The problem: Twitter itself doesn’t know what is trending for different topics. But, many services and users exist to find the best tweets about different topics; Twitter could follow their example or buy or partner with users/services.

Have key accounts people are required to follow

Similarly, have official accounts for different topics. Require that each user follow a general “Twitter urgent notifications” account and at least one official account for a topic that interests you. Then let users decide whether they want to see more or fewer tweets from those accounts (by following @t_fashion_all vs @t_fashion_min for example). Then ads can be mixed into the tweets from these accounts.

The problem: This would require a change to Twitter’s infrastructure, and finding the right balance of tweets, such as deciding when to repeat tweets.

Provide services people want

I know that there are tons and tons of features that users absolutely love that Twitter doesn’t provide. I spend hours every week helping users find and use tools that allow things such as searching old tweets. There is a way to monetize this that I haven’t seen anyone try, nor anyone talk about. I’m going to propose how that might work in my next blog post. So stay tuned!

UPDATE: As of 12-15-10, you can buy Twitter Advertising online. As of 2-14-11, buying a promoted trend on Twitter costs $120,000/day

Both third-party ad brokers and Twitter itself have gone through a few twists and turns that shows no signs of getting easier to understand any time soon. As of early 2011, the latest development is that Twitter has two partners that will sell you access to search the “firehose” (the stream of all tweets)—@gnip and @DataSift.

We won’t run ads. No wait, we’ll run several kinds

First, the co-founder of Twitter said Twitter wasn’t considering an advertising-based business model at all. So many companies jumped in to run ads on Twitter. If Twitter wasn’t going to do it, why not?

Then Twitter began testing not one, but several ad programs, and set a bunch of restrictions on anyone but Twitter showing ads. Of course the about-face had everyone up in arms, and required some clarification from Twitter.

There are many kinds of ads that can be Twitter-related. For example, many tools and apps for Twitter are advertising sponsored. PowerTwitter, for example, changes the look and function of your Twitter web page—and adds advertising that can confuse users as to whether its coming from Twitter.

I’m going to concentrate in this post primarily on ads from Twitter, and ads that look like tweets.

►  TIP: If you just want to send tweets that you get paid for, check out this list.

Twitter offers up to five kinds of ads now:

1. Promoted Tweets on Twitter.com
2. Third Party Promoted Tweets
3. Trending Topics Ads (“Promoted Trends“)
4. Sponsored Definitions
5. @EarlyBird specials (Edit: Twitter cancelled these “Special time-bound deals, sneak-peeks, and events”)

And, make no mistake, Twitter’s ads are showing great potential. A test of Twitter advertising by Coke may have set an internet advertising record.

Other Twitter revenue sources

• Twitter’s first revenue source was renting commercial access to its traffic “firehose” to big players like Microsoft and Google. Next they let certain startups rent access to the firehose of tweets, and as of April, 2011, there are two Twitters partners that will rent access to searching the firehose to anyone—@gnip and @DataSift.
• Twitter gets paid for giving a website (ExecTweets) that collects Tweets from various executives its stamp of approval and for promoting the site on Twitter itself.
• Paid Commercial Accounts in beta coming soon
• Paid promotion of your Twitter account (to help you get more followers)

Will Twitter squash its competition?

There are at least ten third-party companies that offer ads on Twitter that show up as tweets. They broker between the advertiser and the user. Twitter, as mentioned, has limited what they can do. But will we see future announcements of greater limitations?

Right now, advertisement brokers are pushing hard against Twitter’s rules—and risking being banned. Basically, can you make an ad that isn’t a tweet, and isn’t in the stream with other tweets, but still have it look like a tweet? Twitter needs to set clearer standards on this.

They could also set the standard for identifying ads that are actual tweets. You can do anything you want currently. At one time you could tell some URLs were affiliate links (for example, Amazon.com’s link shortener). But Twitter now reshortens shortened links so they are run through Twitter’s system for checking for malware, and to provide a consistent URL length.

Most important: Twitter should be able to set clearer standards without ever affecting what users can and cannot tweet.

Know of a company offering ads on Twitter? Leave a comment and I’ll update this post and credit you.

More third-party ad brokers are coming

I think this is a given. Eventually, there could be a shakeout, but it’s not that hard to start a service to fit advertisers with people who want to tweet ads for pay.

For now, and in no particular order (using only easily accessible information from each company’s website), third-party Twitter ad brokers include:

PayMeTweets

Earn Money on Twitter by simply following @PayMeTweets. If you see a tweet on the @PayMeTweets page you’d like to RT for pay, click the rtee.me link at the end of the tweet. Once you accumulate $25 in your account you can request a withdrawal. You can also use the money you earn to pay for your own sponsored tweets, a sort of tweet exchange.

SponsoredTweets/Izea

Sponsored Tweets is a new Twitter advertising platform that connects advertisers with tweeters. Advertisers can create sponsored conversations on Twitter. Tweeters can earn money for spreading the word.

MyLikes

Create sponsored likes – Donate or earn money. Create and publish your likes to your twitter, blog or youtube. The more influential you are, the more you get paid
Use word of mouth to advertise your business. Choose to run a text or video campaign. Choose to pay for clicks, tweets or videos

Ad.ly

Distribute your message through influencers on Twitter & MySpace. Ad.ly’s Performance Ads enable you to target end users in the stream based on what they are reading, their location, and their interests.
Ad.ly’s machine learning algorithms ensure that your ads find the right audience. Leverage Ad.ly’s self-service platform now or contact our direct sales team to get started.

Twittad

Twittad is the largest and most effective form of sponsored advertising on Twitter.
Your brand will be promoted across the entire eco-system by evangelists who want to help promote your brand! You can also use our technology for targeted @replies to consumers who mention specific keywords, key phrases OR consumers tweeting near your business!
As a Twitter User, you can use the Twittad network to safely and effectively monetize your content. Promote only who you want!

adCause

adCause matches advertisers with publishers (twitter users). Publishers will get paid show ads in their twitter feed. The more influence you have on twitter, the more money you will make.
Do I have to give money to a charity or a cause? Of course not, you can keep all the dough for yourself, but why not throw your favorite cause or charity a bone. Other users will be more accepting of you displaying ads if they know that some or all of the proceeds are going to a good cause.

Magpie

Magpie, the original Twitter advertising network, assists brands to harness the power of conversation.
Our platform enables advertisers to create relevant, controlled and individualized sponsored conversations in a mutually beneficial partnership between advertisers and twitterers.

RevTwt

General ad network.

140 Proof

Most ad solutions just sell keywords because they can’t deliver measurable engagement or real brand connection. 140 Proof™ can.
140 Proof lets you see customers through the lens of Twitter. We match ads to people by what they care about, using public Twitter data. Successful ads are retweeted and shared with followers. You pay only for your “first-order” audience; succeeding reach via retweets and word of mouth is both free and quantifiable.
140 Proof’s patent-pending algorithm reaches the right audience across mobile devices, desktop clients, and the web: wherever tweets are served. Find out more about how 140 Proof can help your brand connect and conquer.

TweetMart

Think of tweetmart as classifieds for Twitter®. It is a free an easy way to buy and sell “stuff” or search and post jobs on Twitter®.

From "What Are The Unspoken Rules of Social Networks?"

Pay 4 Tweet

A way to help successful publishers add Twitter as a revenue source, while keeping the process simple and transparent to both advertisers and publishers.

TweetUp

Lets you bid for keywords, and have your tweets shown as ads across a variety of platforms when people search for those keywords. Kind of a mini-Google AdWords for tweets.

What’s allowed, what’s not—for now

Twitter and most of what are now its competitors in the ad marketplace are scrambling to make deals to get their ads into popular programs such as Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Seesmic, etc. The makers of those popular programs have their own ideas for showing ads as well.

This is what required some clarification from Twitter a while back. Third-party apps and devices can show ads, but they have to be careful that they don’t look like they are in the stream of “real” tweets.  Ad.ly in particular is pushing hard against Twitter’s rules.

Of course, if you want to send tweets that are ads—which then show up in other people’s stream of real tweets, Twitter won’t stop you, and will probably never limit your options. They will likely continue making rules for the ad companies, but not for users.

Now that Twitter is showing so many kinds of ads, will they continue to increase the methods of “official” advertising they show? Hard to say, but it’s a trend that doesn’t seem to have stopped yet. I would expect at least one more announcement from Twitter about a new/enhanced/expanded advertising opportunity available through Twitter.

Google ads that are tweets

Earlier this year, Google began running tweets in locations that ads would usually go in. This amounts to advertising your Twitter profile, helping users to get more followers and build their brand. By entering the marketplace of ways to advertise your Twitter profile, Google signaled it was leaving no stone unturned in efforts to monetize the existence of Twitter.

Ways to advertise your Twitter profile

In addition to Google, you can advertise your Twitter profile via several services, including:

• Featured Users Twitter application ad network
• Chirrps Featured User Program
• TwitterCounter Featured Users

Showing you profile by showing a recent or selected tweet is the most common way these services work.

Disclosure: We did some consulting for Chirrps since we love their service—you should try it!—and they gave us a free featured user spot afterward as an unexpected thank you.

We did gain quite a few followers that can be directly attributed to being featured, so I can recommend their spot based on our experience. However, I don’t know what it costs, or what results you should expect.

Should YOU tweet ads?

Realize that paid tweets make most users very little money. Which leaves many people feeling that they are selling out for little gain. But a lot of users do show paid tweets. Most started by testing them and seeing what complaints they got, and how much money they made and then deciding whether to continue.

Also, there are a wide variety of systems for choosing what you tweet. Some let you write most of the tweet. I tested a system some months ago when I saw that two of the paid tweets were things I had already tweeted about for free. But after running three ads one weekend, I decided against continuing. I would only want to tweet things I actually endorsed or felt were useful to share, and finding those things is difficult.

Twice when we found a product we were ecstatic about, we tweeted an affiliate link (Amazon.com) to where we purchased the product. This I feel good about. Something that naturally occurs in our life that could be of benefit to others we of course already share.

Have we missed anything?

Know of another company offering ads on Twitter? Leave a comment below and I’ll update this post and credit you.

Thanks!

P.S. I was tempted—for about a second—to join affiliate programs for the ad programs listed here and link to them via affiliate links. But firstly, it’s a lot of hassle to do so for very little return. Then there is the whole feeling that I’m sharing this information for no other reason than to make a few bucks. Everyone needs money to live, but for now I’m just very uninterested in most ways I’ve seen of using ads to make money from Twitter.

UPDATE: June 1, 2011—

• A Volvo ad had 50% engagement rate.
• A Radio Shack promotion ran for one day on Twitter. Next three days, instore exchanges and purchases, up double-digits from day before ad ran. And ad didn’t run anywhere else.

The Next Web reports that the second ever Promoted Tweet had 6% engagement on 85 million impressions.

Whoa.

That’s over 5 million people engaging from just one tweet.

Did Twitter just became the gold standard for online advertising?

Even at a more typical .02% response to online advertising, that would represent 170,000 people engaging. So, while it’s too early to say for sure, Twitter appears headed into the stratosphere of the online advertising world. I can’t decide if the response rate or the total engagement is more impressive.

The advertiser, Coke, saw these results in 24 hours, according to Yahoo Finance and the Financial Times, from this tweet:

Captured by UK Tweeter Neville Hobson/@jangles for TheNextWeb

Of course, the US and UK have huge populations on Twitter, and this tweet ran during the US vs England World Cup match. While Coke is clearly not a newcomer to recognizing good advertising opportunities, Promoted tweets seem to have a potential never seen before in online advertising.

Best of all: You can ignore them

But you know what I like best? Promoted Tweets are minimally intrusive. Easy to ignore, but still apparently great for advertisers.

What do you think?

1. Do you mind Promoted Tweets?
2. Would you respond to a Promoted Tweet? Did you respond to the Coke ad?
3. Is this a good way for Twitter to pay its bills while keeping the user experience positive for it’s users?

UPDATE: @DaveWiner points out in fact, that this is really, really hard to believe. Good point. Wouldn’t be surprised to hear some backtracking on this later. But for now, just…wow.

What if the police put up lots of fake speed limit signs—that you didn’t have to follow—and then set up speed traps wherever the speed actually changed after a real sign? They would catch a lot of motorists going the wrong speed. Many people would fail to notice which the real signs were at first (did you take a close enough look at the photo with this article?).

But then what if someone tied huge orange banners to the fake signs?

Very quickly everyone would learn to tune out any sign with an orange banner. This is why banner ads on websites work so poorly. Because of their recognizable wide size and position at top or bottom, and because they are rarely relevant to our purpose in coming to a site, we quickly learn to tune them out.

Humans are great at tuning out non-relevant, easily identifiable information.

Twitter is putting ads that look like tweets at the top of streams. Their deadly problem is that they are literally teaching us to tune them out because they aren’t yet relevant to most people. They will have to become extraordinarily relevant or interesting to break through the fact that we are being taught not to read them. They are failing to use promoted tweets effectively to teach us not to tune out the “tweet at the top.”

How expensive will this mistake be?

At one of this country’s largest Renaissance Festival some years ag0, I had 50 people working for me at a series of souvenir shops. During the first year, I determined that awareness of our products was low. It was because salespeople were trained to behave aggressively toward visitors. Yes, they were entertaining, but people for the most part avoided the areas around the shops with the most “entertaining” salespeople, realizing they were basically being accosted.

So I set up a product display—basic merchandising—at location that led to a shop, but was not near the shop. People were free to visit or ignore the product while being guaranteed to avoid the salespeople. Sales had been stagnant at this location for several years, always hovering just under $100,000 for the 15 days of the festival. I didn’t get the display up for the first two days of the festival, so the test would only run for 13 days.

The result? Even though we’d missed nearly 1/7th of the festival, sales were OVER $200,000. That’s right—sales more than DOUBLED when we overcame the problem of people tuning out. (Traffic—the number of visitors— was steady and weather was similar for all the years of this test.)

No matter how great Twitter’s sponsored tweets are, if they TEACH people to tune them out, they’re going to lose the majority of their financial potential as a business.

What should they do instead then? They’re doing some of it by showing promoted tweets at the top too. These are the most popular, relevant tweets culled from a particular set of search results. But they need to to mix the sponsored (ad) tweets in very gently. I’ve experienced so many search results with sponsored tweets at the top I’ve long since stopped looking at the “tweet at the top.”

Twitter needs to make adjustments immediately if they are to overcome the natural ability of humans to tune out, or it will kill their business model.

Will Twitter listen?

In a word: no. The management of successful businesses does not listen to outside sources, as a rule. Twitter’s great success in becoming popular and well-known is a powerful force pushing them into the kind of cloistered tunnel vision that is common in those kinds of situations.

So, what happened at the renaissance festival?

I told the upper management at the festival why what I had done worked. Their response? Build a giant castle in that location, forcing people to go into the Lion’s den—an enclosed space filled with salespeople—just to see the product. The result? Sales dropped well below $100,000. Did management understand why? No. They made their plans without me, and in spite of my explanation. But I had just done the same thing for a chain of about 50 Midwestern health food stores a few years previously. I knew the power of humans to tune out, and how powerful it could be if you could overcome it.

At the health food stores, I had more than quadrupled key sales.