What’s The Big Idea
I am doing an experiment on Twitter throughout Wednesday 20 May 2009 09:00 – 20:00 GMT to see if there is a way for subject matter experts to provide their professional services via 140 characters and earn a fee for it.
Here is the offer, I will give anyone who tweets me a 140 character consultation/technical support answer on any WordPress technical issue they may have.
In exchange I will ask them for a tip. This is completely at your own discretion. If my answer was no good or you feel it is not worth a tip simply walk away.
This may cause uproar, a lot of people think the interchange of information and ideas should be free on twitter , but why not carry the real world personal services tipping culture online. I remember a time a gave a hotel usher $1 to open a taxi door, surely some expert advice is worth the same gesture? Let’s run the experiment and see what happens.
How to give a Tip
First you need to register with TipJoy. Tip Joy is a cool little startup which allows people to send money via a tweet. You need to create an account and then charge your account up via your credit card.
To make the payment you need to make a tweet in the following fashion
p $X @wpdude for wordpress services
Replace X with the amount you want to tip, the recommended amout is $3, but if you think my tweet is worth more (or less) please feel free to change the amount.
The Write Up
I will also write up a detailed description of the day to let you know the response and how well or poorly the experiment worked including full disclosure of money earned, the amount of work required to do earn this cash and my observations on the day.
Micro Payments Are The Future
I think micro payments are the future of the knowledge industry. Instead of the large hourly consulting fees or deleveoping content for a miniscule adsense click awaywhy not give a micropayment tip. Sometimes you just want quick pointer or nugget of information not a full on consultation. Check out Nick Cernis’ excellent blog post on the subject http://putthingsoff.com/the-end-of-free-content/.
I need Your Help
Please tweet and RT this page by clicking on the button above, I need to generate some buzz for Wednesday.