Twitter ads a salami strategy and potential crisis PR tactic
In this guest posting, Reading Room’s Cathie McGinn argues that Twitter’s new advertising model could be a new weapon for a brand involved in crisis PR management or looking to drive a time-limited campaign.
Twitter’s attempt at an advertising revenue model is neither innovative nor confronting.
It’s what a Swiss friend of mine calls the ‘salami tactic’ –the idea that distasteful things are a little more palatable when you choke them down piece by piece. Twitter is introducing Promoted Tweets –tweets given prominent placement by brands paying for the privilege – initially only in its search results, with plans to roll this out into users’ timelines once the model has been thoroughly tested and refined.
It’s based on a model we’re already very familiar with. Google has been doing it to great effect, incrementally and iteratively changing the way that results in paid and organic search are displayed, and we’ve become accustomed to sponsored listings creeping into our browser’s hot spots.
be curious to see how they compare with the facebook click rates – not all that good, as I recall.
Be interested to see if there are any changes to the T&Cs regarding advertising – to lock down on people using Twitter for advertising without paying Twitter….
If you search for ‘coffee’ now, you get a Starbucks ad. It has begun. I think it’s definitely wise of them to start with search rather than much more intrusive main timeline ads. It also makes sense from a relevance point of view of course. In financial terms, it’s has certainly worked for Google.
It’ll be interesting to see how users take it in the coming weeks and months. As you say, we really have no choice, other than to stop using the service. Waiting this long to implement ads means that a lot of users are pretty hooked on the service for their day to day communication. I know I am.
Having said that, in the past, if users haven’t like a new feature or function, they haven’t been afraid to let the company know, en mass.
This may work in search, but I’m wondering how these ads will look and feel in other Twitter contexts. For me, a Twitter timeline is a much more personal space than browsing a news website or whatever, because it’s a stream of conversation with those I’ve chosen to be part of my instantaneous connections.
Will commercial messages seem too intrusive? Will they be able to look any less lame than “you mentioned ‘coffee’ so we’ll bleat ‘Starbucks'”? That’s no different from the Twitter word-match spammers we already instantly block. Could backfire.
I wonder if the promoted tweets will be included within the twitter firehose?
/y0z
I resent the name Salami Strategy and the definition supplied. I love salami!
A good first look at promoted tweets. Another whole new thing for us to all think about as we guide clients through the social and semantic maze
I have a sponsored link in my blog post )http://pushagency.net/2010/04/15/twitter-might-be-twits/) but you have probably already seen them by now
Jimi Bostock
PUSH agency
BRISBANE | CANBERRA| SYDNEY
AUSTRALIA
They’d want to be careful. I don’t think Twitter would be that hard to reproduce and slap another name on it so if they piss too many people off they may have a competitor on their hands.
I think, however, that like with most things we will just get used to it. Will be interesting to hear some results on the effectiveness of these sponsored tweets though.
Twitter killed its competitors on the way up (Pownce and Jaiku come to mind). It’s only real competitor these days is Facebook, which has taken on Twitter-like features. Foursquare seems to be gaining steam but is something different again.