New York Times’ Randall Stross wrote a piece Sunday, outlining some of the “difficulties in making brand advertising work on social networking sites. Members of social networks want to spend time with friends, not brands.”
That’s a theme I’ve stressed on in posts as far back as in August, when I compared it to a Pyramid scheme. Call it what you will, but this idea of becoming pitch-men to your close friends could damage your social brand. As Randall writes:
And when they try to take advantage of new “social advertising,” extending their commercial message to a member’s friends, their ads will be noticed, all right, but not necessarily favorably. Members are understandably reluctant to become shills.
Why is Twitter different
However, in my estimation, Twitter may be immune to such ad targeting hardships primarily because of the inherent promiscuity in following and lack of intimacy that Twitterers exhibit with their connections in the network. This strangely enough, leads to your sharing an incredible amount of information about yourself as candidly as possible!
So, while I carefully prune and maintain my true social network (~230 friends), I’m followed by nearly 2000 folks on Twitter. While I’ve shared ~600 Posted Items on my social networking site of choice, I’ve shared ~4000 tweets on stuff I love and hate in half that time. Here’s a sampling of thoughts/tweets, which is less than a week old, preceded by potential ads/deals that I’d have appreciated:
Subscriptions to GQ & Esquire, Ads for Gap, Banana Republic?
What’s your favorite scarf wrap? http://tinyurl.com/6rmjmf I prefer the Loophole. 4:17 PM Dec 13th
Targeted Fandango ads, please…
Such a flattering review of “The Wrestler” and Rourke’s performance by the New Yorker – http://tinyurl.com/6djqa5 3:43 PM Dec 13th
Benjamin Button LA Premiere – Variety Photo Gallery http://tinyurl.com/5mocyf 12:04 AM Dec 10th
Targeted Netflix/Blockbuster DVD ads for either “Man on the Moon” or Nolan’s “Dark Knight”:
The Existential Clown, Jim Carrey – The Atlantic (December 2008) http://tinyurl.com/5k6shb
Christopher Nolan analyzes his favorite scene in ‘Dark Knight’ | PopWatch Blog | EW.com http://tinyurl.com/5566oy 11:04 PM Dec 9th
Guess what? I actually bought the Dark Knight DVD yesterday. I don’t mind if I’d received ads for a Dark Knight DVD. So, while in Google (you search for stuff and advertisers find you), on Twitter (you say it out loud and advertisers could find you). Either way, there is massive benefit for the user if implemented effectively.
In conclusion, Twitter would be a terrific buy for a search engine, where much of this valuable information is already being indexed. And, Given Ev’s (Twitter co-founder) history with Google (he sold “Blogger” to Google in 2004), the possibility seems all the more intriguing.
p.s. I can be followed on Twitter
Related posts:
I suspect that the best path to monetization would be for Twitter to place a cap on how many people can follow. That cap would be “pierceable” by some sort of fee, either in cash or in tweeting about a sponsor’s product. For casual users, who don’t care if 1000 people follow them, the service would remain free.
For business users who want more than 1000 (or 500 or 750 or whatever the cap would be) it would be worth paying.
It could work so that you pay for every increment of 100 visitors. It would make no sense to buy visitors, since the success of Twitter is that people opt in to follow specific people, but buying a new space to house another 1000 visitors would make sense.
Or it could work that, say, Proctor and Gamble wanted tweets about its new ceiling spot remover product, anyone over 5000 followers would have to Tweet about it.
Hail to the Thieves
Facebook Connect, Google Open Social, and twitter the closed source content trap are all a slap in the face to the Open Principals of the internet.
Any developer and proponent of a truly Open web must take an active roll in pushing for the success of Laconica and OpenID and should not help to extend any closed source application.
Today we have no less than 3 closed source companies in a race to become the “Standard” for holding our Identity and therefore having access to the content that we read and creates. These companies will leverage our content to create revenue; giving nothing back to the content owners or to the community.
Why do developers especially Open Source developers continue to build and extend applications for closed source companies that under mind open source standards and ideals ?
Why do users continue to view giving control of their identity and content to these companies as a win, when in fact the win is clearly on the side of the company that you have allowed to take control of your identity and to generate value and revenue from your content. In return for our compliance we do not even have a right to take our identity and our content where we want.
Open Source developers, please do not write any code to extend the propitiatory services of closed source applications . They are not your “Friend” When you write code for these companies you undermine the integrity of the Open Web.
Mario:
I’m wondering if you’ve fallen into the trap of extrapolating the way the typical social media “expert” uses Twitter onto the population at large.
In other words, I doubt most people are going to rack up large numbers of followers and followees and in fact may choose to keep their Tweetstreams locked.
As new users flock in, people without anything (or themselves) to promote, the idea of following a “power user” will be as enticing as a plate of rancid anchovies. More likely, they’re going to just follow their real life friends (and maybe friends of those friends) and the occasional news source (e.g. @espn_nfl to get football scores) They’re just there for the conversation, so they’re far less open to marketing messages than someone who is already there to promote.
In addition, your proposal is likely to have a chilling effect on speech on Twitter. If I know that mentioning a scarf is going to bring up an ad for GQ, I’ll either not mention it or type something like “arf-scay” to avoid the ad.
I have no idea how Twitter might eventually make money other than to be a loss leader for something like Facebook or (possibly) to sell daily or time-slot sponsorships, so that when you logged on you saw that “Twitter. Brought to you by Starbucks. Home of the $1.50 tall coffee” or something like that. No idea how (or if) that could work with things like TweetDeck and the iPhone apps though.
Bottom line though is that Twitter is going to change when more people jump on board, people who are there for the conversation rather than the links or the self-promotion.
yeah they will surely fall if they did that
Mario, thanks for writing this. I just wrote about the Times article today also.
I joined Twitter a few weeks ago. I have 24 followers. not much, right?
I have a friend who joined about a month ago, and he has 400 followers already. I asked him how he did it. He simply responded, ‘I just started participating more.”
Which, adding to your point, is probably what I should do. I guess I just didn’t think anyone would be that interested in all the content I take in.
I’ll be sure to follow you, Mario.
Re: Twitter’s business plan, good article from the LA Times:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2008/12/twitter-ads.html#more
The interesting thing about Twitter is that it evolved AFTER people had figured out they could advertise in Social Media. So, the sentiment of “invasion” that goes along with things like myspace and facebook, where we first came for a friendly social time and then were bombarded with commercial messaging, is not really the same in Twitter. From day one, people were thinking of how Twitter could be used for their businesses. And, it’s grown up around that culture. I can’t imagine Twitter without the 50k+ follower moguls who are (I don’t care what anyone says) profiting from their popularity.