Sponsored Hashtags #trustFAIL

So Landrover's US campaign has recruited an army of twitterers willing to insert a hashtag (#LRNY) to promote their 2010 cars.

Nothing strange about that. People who want to help other people find conversations regularly use hashtags on Twitter. Just take a look at the Telegraph and the fun they've had with #budget over the last couple of days. PR people and social media types have been using hashtags for ages. (All of sudden an ATL agency uses them, and it makes news. Hmmm)

No - the big difference with this is that it's the first time that a major brand has used a hashtag in above the line ads, and more importantly, according to Mashable, Land Rover PAID twitterers to use their hashtag. They are quite literally buying buzz.

Am I the only one who has a problem with that?

I know that I could simply unfollow people if I knew what they were doing - but paying people to use hashtags just seems slightly insidious. The Magpie model I can cope with - though I don't like it. (And to be fair, I haven't seen the Twittad one in practice, but I'm not sure I like the sound of it)

Maybe I'm naive and old-fashioned, but I think that any commercial company must have a totally clear and transparent relationship with it's audience. And that's why, for me, mixing paid for and non-paid for uses of the same hashtag is a very basic #trustFAIL.

[post-script - I wonder if Mashable has got some of it's facts wrong? Twittad's blog tells things from their side of the story. There weren't many paid tweets. And there was full disclosure that the tweets were from Twittad. Which makes things a bit better I guess - though I still don't like it. But my problem is not how reputable brands might use reputable and transparent techniques to drive traffic, it's the fact that other less-reputable agencies get in there and don't disclose that they paid for some hashtags. Which could totally undermine the medium]