Celebrity, Mass Media in Love with Twitter
A couple of weeks ago, I was listening to a news radio station on the road. Shaq was asked why he loves to tweet. Shaq's response was: what he says to media often gets interpreted wrong or manipulated. Twitter gives him the most direct way to communicate with fans. No media can stand between him and fans to mis-interpret, mis-represent what he tweets.
On the same drive, I listened to a music station. The host asked people to follow the station on Twitter and tweet about the songs they'd like to be played.
The other night, I was watching sportscenter on ESPN. The two hosts were commenting on a sports story and were talked about the tweets fans sent them on the story.
Twitter vs. Yelp for Small Business Owners
On May 19th 2009, I attended the workshop Online Marketing & Social Media for Small Businesses hosted during San Francisco Small Business Week. Twitter and Yelp were among the presenters to try to convince small business owners about the values of their services. Twitter didn't do it convincingly. On contrast, Yelp did a better job.
The room for the event was almost full of people. Most of them are small business owners that took valuable time off to learn about online and social media marketing. So instead of the typical Sillicon valley Meetup where majority of people are technology-centric or so-called xyz media experts, these are the non-typical-valley-users trying to use whatever tools to improve their bottom line.
My Monetization/Business Plan for Twitter
Looks like it's trendy to talk about how Twitter can make money. There are already user-contributed business plans for Twitter.
I haven't looked into details of all these plans/blogs. But I do have some thoughts about how I'd go about monetizing Twitter as if I am Twitter's product manager:
First, I'd just forget about conventional online advertising(CPC/CPM).
- people are on twitter to have conversations. If you are an advertiser that only cares about getting people off Twitter and go to your site, you don't really use Twitter's conversation workflow to market. You are working against Twitter users' behavior.
Tags: twitter product_management monetization data brand monitor
