It isn’t just “tiger blood” fueling Charlie Sheen’s tweeting: There’s a new world of social media advertising hidden behind his micro-blogging, too.
Shortly before Warner Bros. Television announced Monday that it had fired Sheen from the CBS hit sitcom “Two and a Half Men,” the actor tweeted that he wants to hire an intern to assist him. But the tweet also was a paid-for endorsement from the year-old Web site Internships.com, which claims to be the world’s largest internship marketplace.
“I’m looking to hire a winning INTERN with TigerBlood,” read the message, with a link to the site.
The job posting on Internships.com describes the position as a paid, eight-week job for the summer to “work closely with Charlie Sheen in leveraging his social network.”
The partnership was arranged by startup ad.ly, which connects celebrities with advertisers for social media ads. Sheen officially signed on with ad.ly after the Beverly Hills, California-based company consulted with him last week to familiarize him with Twitter.
Ad.ly earlier helped Sheen join Twitter and get his account immediately verified so that users could separate the real Sheen from the many copycat accounts. Sheen took little more than a day to reach 1 million followers, a record. He had more than 2 million followers as of early Tuesday.
All the attention has brought a huge amount of exposure to the business of social media advertising. Though companies have been working advertisements into Twitter and Facebook for more than two years, it’s a sometimes unnoticed practice.
“A lot of people know about the business now,” says Ad.ly CEO Arnie Gullov-Singh. “It’s a validation of the business that we’re building and the overall industry changes that we’re a part of.”
Micro-endorsements can net a celebrity anywhere from $1,000 to the low five figures per tweet, with ad.ly’s top celebrities earning about $10,000 per tweet. Ad.ly…