Figuring out clever ways to spread the word can also be a very good thing. I just happen to prefer clever organic and clever cool over clever manipulative. Clever organic would involve creating something that’s worth talking about. Promotions that get people talking without paying people – through outright payments for tweets, blogs, Facebook updates, etc., or through contest entries – are what I like to see. Obviously, it’s harder to create something people want to talk about than it is to pay them to pimp your stuff to their networks of Facebook friends and Twitter followers, but harder is definitely better in this case.

When I receive tweets, Facebook updates, or other forms of commercial messages from friends that are based on some form of compensation, I think less of my friend for wasting my time and the company who stooped to the level of paying (cash, product, or contest entries) to have my time wasted.

To me, this is a becoming significant problem. I know quite a few people that I find interesting, but not interesting enough to want to deal with the noise in their Twitter and Facebook streams caused by participation in contests to win crap through retweet spam. To make Twitter valuable to me, I’m forced to use it less than I otherwise would if it wasn’t being exploited by advertisers. If the noise gets high enough, I’m sure people would eventually decide to tune out of the service altogether, although it’s likely that someone would figure out how to filter out any mentions of contest entry tweets in order to return value to the service. A Tivo for Twitter, in a sense.