Izea, the maker of PayPerPost and SocialSpark has announced the launch of their "blogger advisory board" today. Izea CEO Ted Murphy explains, "The Advisors will be working together with our management team to guide the company in product development, outreach and further enhancement of our code of ethics."

The group is paid with options, not direct cash. The group includes: Chris Brogan, Michael Brito, Brian Clark, Jim Kukral, Neil Patel, Wendy Piersall, Jeremy Schoemaker and Missy Ward.

The bloggers are responsible for disclosing when they post about Izea. Seems like your typical advisory role trade: stock/options for insight along with some linking from time-to-time. The group will meet at Izea’s HQ in December. I look forward to reading the minutes from the meeting.

While I am not a fan of paid reviews, I am all for paid advertorials on blogs. We are starting to see more advertorials popping up and my hope is that we see more going forward.

It’s interesting to see Neil Patel’s name on the list given his arrangement with Techcrunch. As many of you know, Techcrunch doesn’t like Izea.

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This afternoon comment reputation service SezWho announced three new partnerships. We covered the news along with several other sites.

On the Entrecard side, JoeTech put together 10 reasons why the SezWho/Entrecard partnership is important for bloggers. In the Entrecard community, the SezWho service seems to be well received so far.

Frederic at ReadWriteWeb has a different perspective on the announcements. His article title suggests that SezWho is in desperation mode and signed these deals to try to catchup with Disqus. Frederic notes, "Overall, this is an interesting, yet somewhat desperate, move by SezWho. In terms of publicity, it has been in the shadow of similar ventures like Disqus and Intense Debate." and concludes by noting that Izea is deceptive, Creative Blogging is spammy and Entrecard is niche. I’d like to share my thoughts on his post.

Never once when I read the news did I think that these were moves that signal desperation. Distribution is key for a service like SezWho and while many tech bloggers hate Izea and CEO Ted Murphy, he has access to a large number of bloggers. That’s a smart business move because if any of the Izea bloggers take the SezWho service and subsequently leave Izea, they keep SezWho. And note that I am not a big fan of what Izea is doing either, but having been on the corporate marketing side for nearly 10 years, I get what they are offering. Using Izea as a middleman to get to their set of bloggers for distribution makes sense.

Frederic also notes that "SezWho is under a lot of stress from Disqus and Intense Debate…" I’d love to see concrete proof of why SezWho is under a lot of stress from Disqus? Both Disqus and Intense Debate are building strong products but because SezWho isn’t a valley darling, does that mean they are facing pressure and stress? In fact, I guess Intense Debate must also be under a lot of stress from Disqus as well since they aren’t written about or discussed as often.

We see over and over where one company in an category is a valley darling and gets constant hype (no matter their results) while another company continues to build a product without the hype.

The hypothetical question for Frederic is, if Disqus made the exact same deals today, would you have said that Disqus was in a desperate situation against JS-Kit, Intense Debate and SezWho?

I’d also like to add that I think it was a mistake for SezWho and FutureWorks (the PR agency) to go out with all three releases at one time. I’ve written about the news flow topic before but knowing that many Web tech bloggers find Izea’s services to run on the other side of the fine line, splitting Izea out into a seperate release would have made sense. This would have allowed Entrecard and Creative Blogging to not lose the spotlight over the Izea discussion.

Even more importantly, by splitting up these releases by a few weeks, this would help to keep SezWho top of mind. By sending out three at once, now we may run into a "cold" period for SezWho news. I am sure Brian and his team at FutureWorks have a plan but I wanted to share my thoughts for other startups that don’t have a PR firm. Space out your news and keep your brand top of mind.

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IZEA (formerly PayPerPost) CEO Ted Murphy is on the offensive today. Last night he asked me on Twitter to review a post on the IZEA blog regarding performance of his paid blog network versus an advertising campaign on ReadWriteWeb (RWW), an "a-list" tech blog. If you read only a few posts today, his should be one of them. In general, Murphy’s analysis could work for any display advertising.

He begins by explaining that he purchased a one-month advertisement on ReadWriteWeb for $3,000 and then purchased $3,000 worth of paid posts within the IZEA network. The paid posts came from 220 publishers of all sizes across the network.

His analysis then goes on to determine that 725 clicks came from RWW over the month while his paid blog posts delivered 832 clicks and that the paid blog posts will continue to return some value over time as the posts live on forever (whatever forever means in Internet years). 

Murphy also notes that by posting the "job" on his network, he had at least another 500 of his paid bloggers check out the company - that’s already nearly more than RWW sent. He ends the analysis with the following statement, "people clicking links in sponsored posts have a genuine interest in the site they are clicking through to." The average Internet user has no idea what sponsored means. I’ve tried to explain this to Jason Calacanis as well but shrugged it off. 

Was IZEA’s product the right one for the RWW audience? Last month TechCrunch was running a sponsor ad for car tires. Do people looking for the latest tech news care about car tires? Are they in the "zone" to go purchase a set of 170R15s? We know nothing about the people who visited from either RWW or the purchased blog posts. How many from either actually "converted"? Murphy leaves this out.

While Murphy’s analysis isn’t spot on and there are some huge holes in his theory, he is pushing the conversation of display advertising versus paid posts a step further. It’s a good discussion to have. And for clarity, I am not in favor of paid reviews. I am totally in favor of advertorials on blogs. Mark my words that by the end of 2008 we will see advertorials on blogs as a normal course of business.

Murphy makes a challenge at the end to Pete Cashmore, Robert Scoble and Jason Calacanis. He wants to run a paid post on one of their sites and compare the results to a wide campaign using the publisher network on IZEA. I assume he won’t get any takers for the test.

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