Well, apparently, yes, the borrower really is an adult entertainment professional (later shortened to “porn star” in a followup post), and she really was requesting a second loan from Prosper. Her first loan for a candy vending business back in April 2008, can be found here.

So Prosper, newly relaunched under SEC oversight, and eager for a followup to their Twitter contest, jumped at the opportunity. We hooked a porn star! the all-porn star post seemed to shout. Authored under the pseudonym “Prosper Pink” (complete with Twitter account and Facebook page), Prosper tackled the feminine side of P2P lending, strutting across the wide line that separates financial services from pornography, and wondering aloud why they couldn’t get a little “financially sassy”.

Well, it turns out that attitude and sass can only get you so far in the world of social lending. Even though Prosper has already been compared to financial porn, and even though Prosper’s minimum bid of $25 gives you thirty six hot months of interest from Nina Jaymes (the same as a mere month of access to her web site), the 14-day listing only got to 52% funded. Not surprisingly, the cop and the desk worker both got fully funded within days.

So what’s the moral of the story? Just because you have double D’s doesn’t mean Prosper won’t give you an E rating. If your credit score is between 660 and 680, you have to offer more to lenders than a 9% estimated return (after 14% estimated loss and 1% fees). And if you’re hoping to attract serious investors to your peer-to-peer lending site, focus on borrowers with real assets, not big assets.

Photo credit: NinaJaymes.com

Related posts:

1. Prosper Hosts Twitter Gimmick To Draw New Customers
2. Prosper Relaunches with SEC Approval, Secondary Market
3. Loanio Files Amendment to S-1 with SEC; Cedes Code for Cash

Now P2P lending service Prosper, fresh off their site relaunch in mid-July, is hosting a Twitter contest to grab more followers and, ostensibly, more attention (worked on me, anyway). Prosper is giving away $500 total, $25 to 20 different Twitter users who friend @prosperloans and tweet the following message:

$500 for 500 followers! Follow @prosperloans and RT to enter to win 1 of 20 $25 GCs http://bit.ly/GBUkR #prosper500

The contest runs from Monday, August 3rd to Friday, August 7th at midnight. You can check Prosper’s progress on the #prosper500 hashtag. Since the contest kicked off 17 hours ago, it has generated 15 tweets. Which on a per-tweet basis is costing Prosper about $6.67  (assuming we’re one day into the contest, or $100, divided by 15 tweets).

Do these contests work? And what are they worth? Prosper isn’t just selling shoes, or trying to attract blog readers. They’re making loans, and word of mouth can only get you so far… on Prosper, you need a credit score of 640 or higher to get a loan, and you need some serious cash to be a lender. Is the Twitter generation really the one to target here?

Some metrics from SmartyPig’s recent $100 giveaway might be helpful. SmartyPig is an online service that helps consumers save money for big events through a series of financial and social tools. On the day of their contest, SmartyPig grew by 51 followers (+1.2%). In the ensuing seven days, their follower count stayed flat, and a week later, actually dropped by 37 followers. Compare those results to the impact of a mention in a New York Times article on July 2nd, which yielded 79 followers (+2.0%) on the day of the article, and arguably netted 170 followers (+4.4%) over the three-day weekend. Further, follower growth continued on an upward trend after the article.

Prosper hasn’t had an article in the New York Times since their faux relaunch in April, so maybe the $500 would be better-spent on a plane ticket to New York and some climbing equipment. Now that’s publicity!

Related posts:

1. Prosper Can’t Even Cash In on Porn Star
2. Prosper Takes Debt Financing Bridge at 15% interest
3. Prosper Relaunches with SEC Approval, Secondary Market

In Kiva’s July newsletter, they promoted a video called “If I Had $25“, a play on the Barenaked Ladies hit “If I Had $1,000,000“, created by johnbr2, a musician from Decorah, Iowa:

The song is both Kiva-accurate (buying yaks and looms), well-sung, and hilarious. An interlude that discusses the “cultural imperialism” of Kraft dinner is particularly funny.

Among the highest-quality user-generated content, Zopa Italy takes the cake with entries from their Zopacontest, held in November 2007 to promote the upcoming launch of their site. Many entries are professional and captivating, but the winning entry went to Silvia Casali for her beautiful animation:

Lending Club’s video contest back in 2007 to promote the fledgling Facebook-based site yielded a bunch of entries, and the first place, $3,000 winner was the well-produced “Teddies” video, featuring a small-businessman-with-medical-bills storyline. Among the lot of excellent videos was one without fancy production value, but lovable in its honesty, titled “The Worst Entry For The Lending Club Video Contest“:

Back in 2007 a song entitled “Prosper Panhandler song” was posted by an artist called Underwater Bass Player. The bluesy ballad focuses heavily on Prosper’s now defunct user forums, and in the song, the author agonizes over which Prosper group to pick before eventually settling on one called “Everyday People“:

What other good social media have you seen related to P2P lending? Share it in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Zopa announces launch of Zopa Japan
2. Zopa US – the boy who cried wolf
3. Prosper Hosts Twitter Gimmick To Draw New Customers

MicroPlace breaks down the investments available on their site into three return buckets:

• <1% return – 1 investment (Habitat for Humanity)
• 1-3% return – 77 investments
• 4-6% return – 3 investments

So with only 3 investments in the 4-6% range, MicroPlace’s investments are still heavily weighted towards a 1-3% return.

In fact, if you’re looking for a 6% return, there is only one investment. Your only option is a 45 month investment to “extremely poor” borrowers in Nicaragua. Which is not necesarily bad, except that you might expect a few other options. Not to mention that the black woman featured in the advertisement suggests a different continent altogether.

That said, a 6% return is nothing to sneeze at, especially in this economic condition, and it is exciting to see microfinance start to offer real returns to investors. Hopefully MicroPlace can continue to attract more MFIs that will make that promise of 4-6% returns more widespread.

Related posts:

1. eBay’s MicroPlace Readies for Launch
2. eBay MicroPlace Launches
3. Kiva Launches Lending to U.S. Borrowers

In the beginning, Lending Club had a simple pitch for members: bring your friends and we’ll give you $5. Your friend had to provide a name and email address, and you got $5. Easy money.

Probably a little too easy, because in late 2007, Lending Club changed the rules of their referral program to reward you and your friend $25 if your friend submitted a loan application, or became a lender ($50 if they transferred more than $1,000).

After re-opening their site late last year, Lending Club switched from a home-brewed program to an outsourced program with Commission Junction, and started paying affiliates $35 to $40 per loan application.

Now Lending Club seems to have a new program for existing members that looks a lot like an Amway multi-level marketing scheme. Just invite your friends, and earn $25 when they borrow. Then they invite their friends, and you still earn $15. Then the friends of your friends’ friends join, and you earn $10. In their example, if you invite 5 friends, and they invite 5 friends, and those people invite 5 friends, you earn $1,750. On the lender side, Lending Club pays $50 per new lender. It’s unclear whether they require a minimum amount to be committed, although they must.

Lastly, Lending Club has added a feel-good twist, offering referrers the opportunity to donate their earnings to the charity of their choice. The current list of charities includes  the United Way, the American Red Cross, the American Cancer Society, The Nature Conservancy, Habitat for Humanity, the World Wildlife Fund, and Doctors Without Borders.

Pertuity Direct just recently launched their affiliate program, and has a payment structure similar to an earlier Lending Club setup: $35 for each approved borrower application ($40 if >10 per month), and $50 for each new lender application ($60 if >10 per month). The program is set up through Commission Junction.

Since it’s not a true peer to peer lending site (lenders are basically investing in a mutual fund of borrower loans; not choosing borrowers directly or setting rates), Pertuity Direct is probably using Commission Junction because they don’t already have the infrastructure to support payments. CJ is an expensive proposition for advertisers, though. The maintenance fees can eat up between 20-30% of the program’s cost, so if you can roll your own, you can save a lot of money (or pay it out to the publishers). We’re eager to see how these marketing models evolve over time.

Related posts:

1. Pertuity Direct Launches Mutual Fund-like P2P Lending
2. Pertuity Direct Shuts Down Unexpectedly
3. Pertuity Direct Lends $500K in First Two Months