What Should Twitter Ads Look Like? And Will You Really Love Them?

What Should Twitter Ads Look Like? And Will You Really Love Them?   

           by Erick Schonfeld on Feb 23, 2010

Twitter is getting closer to launching its own advertising on the micro-messaging service. Speaking on an advertising industry panel yesterday, the company’s head of monetization, Anamitra Banerji, confirmed that Twitter would launch its own advertising platform within a month or so, at least in a beta test. Twitter has been planning to launch an advertising product for a long time. Last November, COO Dick Costolo told us at our Realtime Crunchup that ads were coming. He promised the new ads “will be fascinating. Non-traditional. And people will love it.” And a year ago, Twitter execs discussed different advertising revenue models in a strategy meeting, including realtime search ads, sponsored Tweets, and AdSense-like widgets that could appear on other sites.
Of course, other startups are already experimenting with their own Twitter ads ranging from in-stream sponsored Tweets (Ad.ly) to placing retweet buttons on display ads themselves (Tweetmeme). But what will an official Twitter ad look like? And will people really love it?
There are lots of options for different ad units on Twitter.  Seth Goldstein, the CEO of SocialMedia, was on the same panel and is the one who grilled Banerji about Twitter’s ad plans.  He presented the slide above, which gives some flavor the types of ads which could appear in a social stream like Twitter.  Ads could range from straight endorsements (“This is my favorite salsa”, “My favorite car is a Jetta”) to more subtle local business ads (“I am at Starbucks,” “I am the Mayor of Superdive”).
Other people think the Tweets themselves should be sacrosanct.  Robert Scoble, for instance, suggests the idea of a SuperTweet with all sorts of metadata that pops up when part of the message is rolled over with your mouse.  This data could include things such as the location of the Tweet and how many times it’s been retweeted, but it could also trigger a contextual ad triggered by certain keywords.
Most likely, the ads will start out simple.  If they are in-stream ads, they will be clearly labeled as such, perhaps by highlighting the Tweet with a different background color or otherwise clearly marking it as “Sponsored.” Right now, the only way you know something is a sponsored Tweet is if it is disclosed in the text of the Tweet itself, like in this Ad.ly example:

Twitter could make them stand out more and really distinguish them as ads.  But that in itself would find little love from most Twitter users.  For ads to work on Twitter, or anywhere else on the Web for that matter, they need to be authentic and useful. Contextual ads related to keywords in specific Tweets or shown only to people who are known to be interested in related topics is a better approach.  It is fairly simple to analyze people’s Tweet streams and cull the main topics they either talk about or the topics of the Tweets the people they follow talk about.  Semantically targeted ads should perform better than random ones.  But it’s still not clear what there would be to love there.
It also is not clear what the rules will be for Twitter ads. Will they just start appearing in everyone’s stream, or do you have to allow ads into your stream?  And if you allow the ads, do you get a cut of the ad revenues since they are being shown to your followers?  I’d be very surprised if there is a user opt-out for ads, and even if Twitter starts the ads on its own site it would make sense if it could syndicate them out to third-party Twitter clients.  Eventually, if a Twitter client takes the stream, it will have to take the ads as well.  Presumably, Twitter would offer them a cut of any ad revenues much like Google does with AdSense.
Finally, there is the question of how the ads will be paid for. It makes little sense to charge on a per follower or per impression basis because people tend to read their Twitter streams sporadically.  A cost-per-click model would work much better. Twitter could create a keyword auction to trigger the insertion of the ads and advertisers would only pay for actual clicks like they do with search ads.  That way the entire message of the ad would not have to be contained in the Tweet itself.
With 1.5 billion Tweets a month and growing, advertisers will certainly love any opportunity to insert themselves into the conversations occurring on Twitter. But users generally don’t love ads, they hate them. And it is hard to believe that Twitter is somehow going to magically change that basic fact of life. You tell me: What would Twitter have to do to make you love its ads?

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CrunchBase Information

Twitter

Website:	twitter.com
Location:	San Francisco, California, United States
Founded:	March 21, 2006
Funding:	$160M

Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

via techcrunch.com

Driving Traffic with Twitter

Driving Traffic with Twitter

Twitter Can Be a Primary Traffic Source
Sunday, March 22, 2009 

By Chris Crum

Reports suggest that social networking is now more popular than email. Twitter in particular grew 33% in only a month according to Compete data. Skittles increased its own traffic by 1332% in one day after a campaign that sent Skittles.com directly to a Tweet-stream (the site has since moved to different strategies of a similar nature like a Facebook page and currently a Wikipedia entry, which is in itself another interesting story).



 Do you have tips on how to use Twitter to drive traffic? Tell us... 

Many brands large and small are realizing the potential that Twitter provides. "As exciting as it may be to hear about what your friends, or total strangers for that matter, ate for breakfast, some companies are realizing that a more effective use of Twitter is to mine it for clients, recruit employees and answer customer service questions," notes Kim Hart with the Washington Post.

Twitter is becoming a primary traffic source for many sites as John Battelle points out (Facebook is driving a lot of traffic as well). This will only continue to become truer as real-time search continues to grow.

"Social search has been predicted (and funded) for years," says Battelle. "It's finally happening. The conversation is evolving, from short bursts of declared intent inside a query bar, to ongoing, ambient declaration of social actions. Both will continue, but it's increasingly clear why Google's obsessed with Facebook (and Facebook with Twitter). And they are not alone."

MarketingPilgrim's Andy Beal and many others expect Twitter to eventually be acquired by Google. "Twitter is becoming an important communications channel–intrinsic to the web," says Beal. "Aside from the being able to pick up the company for a fraction of the $15 billion Google has in cash, Twitter is a key component of the search engines’ ambitious goal: to organize the world’s information." Beal finds what he perceives to be hints in the following interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt.




And again, there is of course that whole need for real-time search thing. But Twitter's finally just getting its own search in the spotlight (you can search within your own friends/followers with Twellow now) . There are even featured users showcased, which may or not be an indication of the widely speculated-upon revenue model for the company (Twitter might even start serving local news too).

"When people ask me when Twitter will make money, I tell them, 'In due time,' says Twitter CEO Evan Williams in a quick bio-piece chronicling his professional life up to the present. "They forget that we're only 30 employees who have just gotten started. Right now, anything we would do to make money would take our time away from acquiring more users. We have patient investors."

The average user doesn't care about how Twitter is monetizing its business though. And the users are what drive any success that it will ever have. Users are clearly finding plenty to get out of the service. It hasn't jumped the shark yet.


In fact, it plays so big a role on the Internet that it earned Williams a trip to the White House with a number of other tech leaders. We don't exactly know the product of conversations that came from that, though Data.gov, another site from the Obama administration to be launched, was announced shortly after that meeting. Some wonder if the site and the meeting are related.

Regardless of how much influence Twitter is having or is not having in Washington, there is no denying that it has made a tremendous impact on the web in general and the way people and businesses communicate (it's even inspired a similar model from social network king Facebook).

What businesses can get out of Twitter:

- Traffic. Social networks have taken over email in terms of popularity. Twitter is a very popular one, and continues to grow rapidly.

- People can "opt in" to follow your Tweets, so your messages will be well targeted. This makes it a great place to make announcements to your most loyal customers.

- Twitter can serve as a great channel for customer service if you keep up with it like these brands are.

- It lets you interact with the public while increasing brand awareness

- Twitter's search function can help businesses better manage their online reputations in real time.

- Facebook apps can let you update Twitter/Facebook together. This means your Tweets can become your Facebook status and vice versa. Facebook is the most popular network around. Between Facebook and Twitter, you can build quite a following.

There are quite a few benefits for a company without a known revenue model and a service that many people still don't understand the point of. As Twitter grows, that seems to be changing though.

Update: Listen to what avid Twitterer Michael Gray has to say about making Twitter work for you in this exclusive interview from PubCon:

via webpronews.com

8 Sources of Web Traffic

Consider These 8 Sources of Web Traffic

By Chris Crum - Thu, 02/18/2010 - 4:23pm.

Ways to Get Traffic Besides Search
Over the last year or two, I've written a number of articles about different ways to get traffic to your website. Here is something of a compilation of these concepts. Obviously search engine optimization is an important component, but I'm going to leave that out here.

Facebook
Some sites have been known to get even more traffic from Facebook than they get from Google. I suggest setting up a Facebook page. Compete recently found that demographics of Facebook users strongly resemble demographics of Internet users in general. Essentially, that means that people of all kinds are using Facebook. You have potential customers on Facebook.
Twitter
For some sites, Twitter is their primary traffic source. Now that Google is including real-time search in their search results, Twitter itself is getting more traffic. For newsy Google queries, newsy tweets are getting a lot more exposure. Twitter also has a way of making content go viral (much like Facebook does, only on a much more open and public level). 
LinkedIn
I spoke with entrepreneur Lewis Howes this week about LinkedIn as a traffic source. A lot of people see different advantages to that network, but often don't consider it a significant traffic driver. For Howes, its in his top five. He talks about ways to build your LinkedIn strategy as a traffic-driving tool.

StumbleUpon
Last year, WebProNews talked to Brent Csutoras about how to drive traffic with stumbleUpon. He said StumbleUpon is capable of sending anywhere from thirty to two hundred thousand unique visitors over a period of a week. More on that here.

MapQuest
MapQuest has a new geo-search engine, and is making improvements to its business search functionality. "We also have nearly 1 million City Search listings that provide a wealth of information and has the ability to drive traffic to the business web site," a spokesperon recently told me. "Businesses can offer very helpful information including menus, coupons, and more on their CitySearch listing.  Businesses should contact CitySearch to become part of the information feed." More on that here.

QR Codes
Have you considered creating yourself a QR (quick response) code that people can scan with their mobile phones? Think about what Google is doing. It's handing out stickers to businesses to put on their windows with codes that go to Google Place Pages. There are also ways you can make your own codes that direct users to your site. Then you can put that code in print media, signage, business cards, etc.

Blogs
You can still get a significant amount of traffic from blogs. Alice.com proved this a while back. The catch is that you have to do something extraordinary that acquires the attention of bloggers. Find ways to get noticed.

Pictures
A while back, we looked at some data from Hitwise that showed some photo searching habits. Including photos and optimizing content that includes photos can pay off in traffic, particularly in cases where photos are in demand. For example, if you can get photos of an event or of a brand new product that you are selling.
These are only a few ways to get significant amounts of web traffic, but each one requires some effort on you part. You have to work for traffic, and there are plenty of tools available to you to do that. However, don't just expect to slap up a profile or a piece of content and expect the traffic to come pouring in. It doesn't usually work that way.

via smallbusinessnewz.com

5 Reasons to Write Procedures in Twitter

Posted by Julie Norris on January 11, 2010 · 8 Comments 

Recently, I’ve been exploring the need for writing procedures in real-time, focusing on Twitter in particular. This is the fourth post in the series. In my last post, I was asked by Larry Kunz in a comment for thoughts on situations in which one might write procedures in Twitter. Five come to mind; I’ve described them below.

Push Information

The beauty of Twitter is that you can quickly disseminate information to a large, targeted audience. Initially, it would, of course, be followers of the feed in question. Retweeting then magnifies that distribution, possibly exponentially. In classic online docs (help, websites, knowledgebases, and the like), we wait for users to come to us. By using Twitter, we can go to them.
This puts an entirely different spin on the whole question of doc development. When planning a content strategy, consider this: what might you want to hand-deliver to your users vs. requiring them to come to you to find?

Quick Fixes

Let’s say, for example, that you have a procedure regarding a fix that’s needed immediately. If one user has a question about it and asks a question on a Twitter support feed, you can be sure that there are many that have the same question. So if a person retweets a procedure, it could possibly travel far. If there’s a negative comment (e.g., something along the lines of “this app doesn’t work, it’s awful”) it might compel a company to get out a fix or explanation, or a quick procedure to quell disruptions.
Example: late last year there were there hacking attacks that affected WordPress sites that hadn’t been upgraded to the newest version. Site managers that had not yet upgraded needed to act immediately to fend off an attack on their sites. News came through Twitter. It was retweeted everywhere. That’s how I found out about it. In such a case, you could write a quick procedure about the upgrade requirements as well as other information. Who knows how far a procedure might travel? I think that tweets pointed people to blogs and sites that had procedures or information about how to address the situation – which in itself is another excellent example.
WordPress is updated frequently. There are docs and blog posts in existence that describe how to upgrade to the latest version. It doesn’t matter what version; the same basic procedures apply to any upgrade. (That’s the beauty of WordPress. There’s so much information out there, and the open-source community is so helpful and collaborative. It’s wonderful.)
If you have an app that has regular updates (as WordPress does), or just has an impending release, why not have something written beforehand that you could point to when necessary? When I ran my Twitter procedure experiment on 12/29/09, Larry Kunz (@larry_kunz) made this suggestion:
“Also, and I know this is a lot harder than it sounds: anticipate the situation, and have responses pre-written, ready to go.”
This is exactly the type of situation that fits Larry’s suggestion. Anything that occurs on at least a periodic basis (such as app updates) should have some docs already written somewhere. Plus, said docs should be written in a generic fashion that would be applicable to any upgrade situation (content management in action) – not just one in particular. You can always address particulars, but have some clean generic docs ready at all times.

Product Launches and New Features

If a company has an app revision or new feature and wants to get the news out, a related procedure in Twitter might support marketing efforts. (As in, here’s our new feature; here’s how to use it.) It also never hurts a company to promote visibility of their products, keeping the company in mind. Pointing out features that would help users and save them time is always a good idea.

Real-Time

People are growing accustomed to getting information right now. They may not have the patience to look through online docs to find it. I cannot emphasize real-time considerations enough. There’s also always the possibility that one of your tweets will be picked up and distributed immediately once it hits the airwaves.
Either put a quick procedure in Twitter, or put in one tweet that links to the appropriate location in online docs or some other location, such as a SharePoint portal. Help your users. Answer their questions before they know they need them. Fix their problems. Monitor support questions and get something out there once in a while. Why not put a short FAQ in your support feed, particularly if it’s asked regularly?
After all, excellent customer service is always a good idea. Given that tech writers must perpetually sell their worth to a company, it sure can’t hurt to help customers.

Go Where Your Users Are

If users are scanning Twitter regularly or using Facebook, that’s where some of your docs should be. If they’re reading your blogs, think about adding procedures there. You can embed Twitter feeds in multiple places: WordPress sites, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google Wave. Also, in Facebook, people can leave comments for each tweet that becomes a status item in Facebook. Look at the Mashable page for an example.
Remember: social media is a primary mode of communication these days. Start using it, if you’re not already. If nothing else, mentions of detailed docs and links to them can easily be integrated into these locations.
If your users are all at Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and the like much of the time, why not go there? If not, you may find yourself standing at an empty storefront.

About Julie Norris
I'm a writer. What else is there to be? Mostly, I tech-write, primarily software help. Been doing that for over 20 years, starting after getting my degree in Technical Communications. When possible, I also write for fun; perhaps I'll toss up some of those thoughts as well.

via 2morodocs.com

HOW TO: Integrate Facebook, Twitter, and Buzz into Your Gmail

HOW TO: Integrate Facebook, Twitter, and Buzz into Your Gmail

With over 9 million posts and comments in two days, Google Buzz has stormed the web like a swarm of locusts. An array of strong features, integration with Gmail, and lots of press have turned Buzz into an overnight phenomenon.
If you’re like a lot of us, you’ve suddenly found yourself using your Gmail even more than you already were. Spending so much time in Gmail and Buzz though inevitably takes away from your Facebook and Twitter, and who wants to sacrifice their tweeting and facebooking?
Luckily if you’re a Gmail user, you don’t have to sacrifice either, even while you’re browsing your email or your buzz.

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Gadget Integration Is Your Friend

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Yesterday we caught a Buzz post by Ari Milner where he described how he turned his Gmail into his personal “social command center.” How did he do it? In his words:

“The key was using Gmail Labs feature at the bottom of the list called ‘Add any gadget by URL’. This allowed me to add these 3 features to my Gmail sidebar.”

By utilizing third-party gadgets, he transformed his Gmail into a place where he could access his Twitter, Buzz, and Facebook straight from his Gmail. Here’s how:

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Step By Step: Integrating Your Social Media into Buzz

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1. Activate “Add any gadget by URL” in Gmail Labs — you’ll find it near the bottom of the list.
2. Now go to Settings –> Gadgets. Here you’ll find a place to add Gadget URLs.
3. Add the TwitterGadget App. Any iGoogle gadget will do actually, but the best one in our opinion is TwitterGadget, a fully-functional Twitter service for iGoogle and Gmail. This lets tweet from the sidebar or open up your Twitter with all of your tabs intact. It even supports multiple accounts.

To add it, copy and paste this URL into Gmail’s Gadget settings: “https://twittergadget.appspot.com/gadget-gmail.xml”

4. Add the Facebook Gadget. In the same way you added TwitterGadget, you can add Facebook to your Gmail. While Google has an official Facebook gadget, it doesn’t play nicely with Gmail, so we suggest using the app Ari Milner users: Facebook Gadget by iBruno. It will expand into the rest of your Gmail for easy Facebook management.

To add it, copy and paste this URL into Gmail’s Gadget settings: “http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/104971404861070329537/facebook.xml”

5. That’s it! Google Buzz, Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail are now all wrapped up into one. Pretty nifty, no? Let us know about your experience in the comments.

via mashable.com

What Twitter is saying about Google Buzz

          February 10, 2010 |  2:29 pm

Since announcing Google Buzz on Tuesday morning, the social network remained a hot topic of discussion on Twitter. A day later, it remains in Twitter's No. 2 trending topic spot worldwide.

After cutting through the chatter, the comments are a mixed bag with no clear positive or negative reaction, according to the social media analysts at the Parnassus Group.
The terms most frequently associated with the initial responses to Google Buzz were Twitter and Facebook, according to the report. Commentators are analyzing and weighing the differences between the leading social networks and Google's newest entrant.
As we said in a video filmed Tuesday, Google Buzz is a mix between the follower dynamics of Twitter and the media-richness of Facebook -- along with other Facebook-like features including commenting and the ability to "like" a post.
Paul Buchheit, FriendFeed founder who now works at Facebook since his company was acquired, wrote, "There's a FriendFeed in my Gmail. Sweet!"
Despite Buzz being the major topic of conversation on Twitter in the last 24 hours or so, it doesn't compare with the excitement garnered by other recent product announcements -- including a certain Google phone.
"The overall volume of chatter is running at about half that for the Nexus One launch and one tenth that of the iPad," wrote Parnassus Group founder Steve Broback in an e-mail.
-- Mark Milian
twitter.com/markmilian

via latimesblogs.latimes.com