It was inevitable that this was going to happen someday, but it’s also kind of a bummer.
The beauty of Twitter to me has always been that it’s organic and allowed me to connect with friends, colleagues, bands and brands in unique ways.
Even as a follower of certain companies & brands, I never felt like I was being shouted at to ‘LOOK HERE! BUY THIS! CLICK NOW!’, but more that I was able to engage with someone from the brand directly in a digital conversation if I wanted to. Essentially I felt like I was getting a sneak peak at what was going on with the brand from a day to day perspective. Of course, not all brands using Twitter follow a model that embodies putting unique content out there for followers, some purely do just yell at people to buy their stuff. That’s a whole other story, but this advertising model could only enable that more.
That said, I’m not sure if the new Twitter advertising model is going to make its users very happy. The model will start out small apparently, but will closely mirror Google’s paid search advertising structure. So, when you go to look for Sue Smith on Twitter, you’ll find an ad for “Sue Smith drinks Joe’s Cola. Click here!” Well, maybe it won’t be that blatant, who knows, but that’s the model.
According to a story in the Wall Street Journal: “Twitter Chief Executive Evan Williams and co-founder Biz Stone have been publicly lukewarm about advertising, suggesting it could irritate users,” so only time will tell how this is going to go.
Based on that statement alone, this should be interesting…
Read the full article here.
It’s truly awesome to see someone like Conan O’Brien, who wasn’t an internet user before in terms of interacting with his fans, more and more becoming a social media powerhouse.
If you’ve been following him on Twitter, you know how hilarious he is (come on, picking fights with Justin Bieber and proclaiming he is only going to follow 1 randomly selected person, the list goes on) and it has been hard to miss the legions of fans that have started groups like Team CoCo on Facebook.
Regardless of whether you like Conan and his comedy or not, he’s a brand with its own unique identity and boy are Conan and his staff embracing every bit of the web to their advantage during the year or so he can’t do tv after leaving NBC. They even appear to be empowering the fans that have started groups like team CoCo and are leveraging them for things like tour posters.
Truly great to see in such a short period of time, the way Conan is carving his niche, engaging with fans, giving them reason to follow him and reasons to buy his product when no one really knows what it will be like (RE: go see him on tour). His 30-city comedy tour, which I’d be kinda skeptical about just because he’s not done that before, sold out after merely a few tweets from CoCo.
All in all, a great story that is continuing to unfold and one that applies not only to famous celebs use of the web, but to brands in general. I for one encourage you to check him out on Twitter. You’ll get some good laughs and may pick up some pointers from CoCo.
Twitter has gone ahead and updated their homepage quite a bit, which was quite surprising when I got there the other night and experienced it. Not that a user would ever really spend a great deal of time on the login page (nor could I imagine Twitter would want them to of course), but this new design actually kind of gives you a reason to do so. Which, if you think about it, potentially has the power to also help increase tweets even more by showing people info they may retweet or talk about before they log in. (Hello high activity ‘Fail Whale’)
Design-wise, it’s definitely a big improvement over the static page that was there before, as the newer dynamic version has ‘Trending Topics’ scrolling in real-time, as well as ‘Top Tweets’. It also has information for the daily wave of Twitter newbies (personal and business related) that sign up, in the form of Twitter 101.
All this before you log in is pretty cool, but to tell you the truth, I really don’t care if #JustinBieber is a “Trending Topic” like everyday, all day.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
In the Internet world everything moves very quickly, especially which technologies and social networks are being most used. One day everyone could be using MySpace, the next, Facebook. In last year and a half Twitter has risen to become one of the most influential social networks on the web. The reason, in my opinion, is the simplicity and usefulness of the platform, and additionally it has become invaluable in helping build a brand. It’s branding built on the simple principle of networking effects.
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