I have finally captured the Bendaroos commercial with my daughters, Jillian and Cassie, in it! It’s not the best quality, but it is still pretty cool.

How did it happen? My girls make video reviews pretty regularly for Sunshine Rewards. Cassie made a Bendaroos video when she was 6 and we uploaded it to YouTube. In June, I got an email from a man who said that he had seen the video on YouTube and was producing the newest Bendaroos commercial. He asked if Cassie would like to be in it. After a few weeks of going back and forth (and sending a current “head shot”), we agreed on a day for him to fly to Indiana to shoot some footage for the commercial. I told him I had another daughter who also does videos and actually made most of the creations in Cassie’s video. He told me that he might be able to use her in the video as well.

On a sunny summer day, a small crew arrived at our house. They did some shooting on our front porch (which you see in the part where Cassie dances and they show the sunglasses and ring). They also shot at our kitchen table (which you just get a quick glimpse of). We waited all summer and were about to think that there was not going to be a commercial.

All of a sudden last week Jillian came home from school and said that a friend has seen the commercial on Nickelodeon. Within a couple of days, other friends started telling us about it and we finally saw it ourselves. The girls were so excited!! Every day now they come home from school and talk about who saw the commercial the day before.

Here’s the commercial in a very low tech way (my Flip camera in front of the television!). There’s a cute little shot of Fishers, Indiana, that locals might recognize. (For the record, they didn’t get paid for the commercial but they did get a lot of Bendaroos!)

Lately the issue of sponsored tweeting has been getting a lot of attention. Last year it was all about the sponsored posts. People weighed in very enthusiastically/critically on either side. Add to that some recent grumblings from the FTC about sponsorship of blogs and you have a very interesting situation.

I didn’t think much about Sponsored Tweets until I met Ted Murphy at Affiliate Summit. I had heard so many negatives from my Twitter friends about ads in tweets that I had no intention of signing up. But then I met him and thought “People immediately think the worst about my rewards site until they meet me and learn what I am doing. Maybe I should give his business a chance.”

Armed with a $100 coupon in my swag bag, I came home and set up a Sponsored Tweet as a sponsor. I told them that they could write whatever they wanted. I didn’t want to influence their writing. They could mark that it was an ad however they wanted as well. I specifically targeted tweeters who posted to moms and who wrote about savings or coupons. I figured that these were people who really could benefit from my business if they clicked on the sponsored tweet.

We did get a number of clicks off of the Tweets, but it remains to be seen how many of those people will become members of our site. I probably should have done a better job of tracking it. Will I continue to use the service as a merchant? Maybe. I genuinely believe that my business fit in with their Tweets and they were all honest with their followers. It’s my hope that they looked critically at my site before they accepted the Tweet offers.

Now this morning I see that Sponsored Tweets has a referral program. I would be silly not to sign up for it because I think it would genuinely interest a lot of my blogger friends. I signed up this time as a sponsored tweeter myself. Honestly, I don’t have a ton of followers so I am not sure that I will even get offers. When I do get my first offer, I will look at it and decide if it is something that I would promote even if I weren’t getting paid. If I would, I might just accept it.

I know some of you are rolling your eyes and already ready to “unfollow” me before we even see if I take an offer. But I think that the medium is too new to draw lines in the sand like that so quickly. Sure, if all I ever do is Twitter junk, you should unfollow me. But what if you are actually interested in the offer that I am Tweeting about? Are you going to unfollow me just on principal.

For the record, this is my Sponsored Tweets referral link. If you are interested, I would love it if you would sign up using the link. If you are totally against Sponsored Tweets, I’d love to hear your comments. We may not change each other’s minds, but it is good to understand where we stand and why.

I was in Facebook tonight creating an ad for Sunshine Rewards when I saw the “coupon” button under Funding Sources. So of course I Googled “facebook ad coupon.” Much to my surprise, there were quite a few out there. However, most were for people brand new to Facebook ads. Because I have created a Facebook ad before, I could not use them.

Then I came across people talking about getting a $100 Facebook ad credit for signing up for the Visa Business Network on Facebook. Sure enough, after I added the application and completed my profile with them (which took about 5 minutes), I received an email with a coupon code for a $100 Facebook ad credit. I entered it into my account and it is showing up.

I can’t speak to whether or not the ads will actually work, but I liked that I was able to use the “Social Actions” check box to tie my advertisement to people who are “Sunshine Rewards Fans” or part of the “Sunshine Rewards Group.” From my own use of Facebook, I know that seeing my friends’ names and pictures over the ads on the right does make me look at them more closely.

So if you are looking for some free advertising, give the Visa Business offer on Facebook a shot. I’ll be anxious to hear what you think about the effectiveness of the Facebook ads. And let me know if you come across mine!