Amazon, Twitter ... and Spam?

The country's leading e-tailer is doing what even Twitter hasn't been able to do: Make money on Twitter.

Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN  ) is rolling out a new feature for members of its referral program this week. Website publishers and bloggers that are logged into the Amazon Associates program are now able to click on a "Share on Twitter" option for any product page on the online retailer's site. Amazon will then fire up the associate's Twitter page, populating the update box with a brief description of the product and a shortened URL.

The monetization kicker is that the shortened link includes the associate's referral code, netting the user as much as 15% from any resulting sales.

It's not perfect. Clicking on the "Share on Twitter" link on Amazon's Kindle page served up this ho-hum description before the referral link: "Check out 'Kindle Wireless Reading Device (6" Display, U.S. & International Wireless, Latest Generation)' by Amazon.com."

Tweeters will naturally want to tweak the tweet, but it's still a win-win offering (for Amazon and the referrer). If one argues that a direct link to a product makes it more convenient to an interested reader, we can even stretch to call this a win-win-win.

Critics will argue that this will surely elevate already-high spam levels on Twitter, ramping up a new breed of bogus testimonials and self-serving pitches on the site. Perhaps, but it's not as if anyone ever dubbed the site that limits missives to 140 characters as an intellectual hotbed of deep thinking. Besides, folks are only reading the updates from those they choose to follow. If an associate's banter gets too commercial, the "unfollow" clicks will follow quickly.

Affiliate marketing is alive and well. Folks create sites or author blogs, only to populate them with contextual marketing ads from Google (Nasdaq: GOOG  ) or Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO  ) . They also turn to action-based networks including ValueClick's (Nasdaq: VCLK  ) Commission Junction or Rakuten's Linkshare. Amazon just happens to be one of the few online retailers big enough to run its own platform. This also gives it the flexibility to jump all over the Twitter craze with a move that may be blatant commercialism, but one should never underestimate the power of monetization in creating a viral hit.