by Shazan Qureshi
After floating four companies over the last three years and acknowledged my childhood passion for the stock market, I’ve found a lot of economic talk is heavily theoretical and needs translating into a real life business context. By providing expert advice with guest columnists, as well as sharing experience and insight my aim is to help you make your enterprises asset rich and ultimately give you the freedom of choice in how you wish to exit or retain your business.
TWITTER-NOMICS
In an attempt to cash in on its popularity, the micro-blogging site is launching ‘promoted tweets’, unleashing branded adverts on its 70m users for the first time. Very impressive, yes - but how are you going to make any money? It is the question asked of the founders of every social networking site.
And now, Twitter has come up with an answer. Here’s the announcement, in less than 140
characters, of course: “Promoted Tweets, the unveiling:
bit.ly/cdbPtt More info to come later this week. Stay tuned!”
It may be only one small step for mankind, but it is a giant leap for the micro-blogging service. Twitter’s founders have spent several years disparaging the idea of allowing paid-for adverts to appear among the never-ending stream of great thoughts and mundane details, breaking news and distracting links.
The ad industry appeared underwhelmed, but several prominent brands said they have signed up to the experiment. Twitter users can now expect to see ads for the airline Virgin America, new movies from Sony Pictures, and for Starbucks and Red Bull. Twitter’s monthly user numbers increased tenfold last year, leading founders to argue that the company was better off letting the site grow before introducing anything that might distract users.
14 - WORK
But things have evolved in the past few months. The company’s venture capital investors, who put in $100m last autumn in a fundraising that valued Twitter at $1bn, are agitating for a return on their money.
Rumours have swirled that Twitter has been examining introducing subscription fees for some users, or ways to sell access to data. In the end, though, it has plumped for something entirely conventional: a system similar to the one operated by Google, which allows advertisers to bid for keywords and then see their ads appear alongside search results when users type in that word.
The explosive growth of Twitter was the media story of last year, as it appeared the service was morphing into something big - even though it was far from certain what. It is still not certain. Many users sign up out of curiosity, never to regularly tweet. Most use it as a way to share details of their lives with a small number of friends, or to post interesting links.
But from stories such as the American Airlines plane that crashed in the Hudson River, to the street protests in Iran, the service also last year proved its worth as a place to break news. By the end of 2009, Google and Microsoft’s search engine Bing had paid a combined $25m for the right to pull the Twitter feed on to their own search sites, so that breaking news would appear more quickly in search results.
Twitter seemed the very definition of the “real-time web”, the buzz phrase of the year. And many companies are already using it for marketing purposes, building a list of followers to whom they tweet information or respond to criticism.
However, the medium is double-edged. Twitter has great potential as a marketing channel with opportunities to create viral buzz around a product or service, encourage customer interaction, and respond more quickly to customers and issues. But the flip side of Twitter’s immediacy is that if advertising messages are not very carefully positioned, users can hit back at brands and in real time, and brands will have little control over this.
The question is whether advertisers really need to pay for “promoted tweets”. Regardless, the announcement is not the final word. Rather, it is the first step in process of figuring out what works. The company already says that promoted tweets that don’t “resonate” with users will be taken down, putting pressure on advertisers to come up with 140-character blasts that twitterers want to share or click on. This immediately raises a red flag - if your Twitter stream starts to resemble spam, you are going to tune out pretty quickly.
For further professional advice and a confidential one-to-one please email
shazan@rejuvenateonline.co.uk
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