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There has been so much conjecture as to how Twitter will start monetizing. Well, it looks like there have been a few baby steps in the form of “sponsored definitions” that cycle through right above the Home link on the navigation bar. It is very subtle and I didn’t notice it myself until today (Seth Simonds has been talking about this since June 23rd).
You won’t see these sponsored definitions every time as they’re interspersed with Twitter definitions that are not sponsored but simply informational or helpful, I guess. An example of a sponsored definition is Exec Tweets and Cinema Tweets — essentially text ads in the guise of being factoids and links to useful apps and services.
According to a blog post I found on blog.twitter.com from back in March, it looks like Federated Media is handling the Twitter sponsored definitions, “It turns out the folks over at Federated Media have both the resources and the expertise. So if you’re a major brand and you want to sponsor a topic-focused social media experience with Twitter, we suggest Federated Media—they’ll fix you up right,” which could be a real score for Federated.
Twitter has done a very good job of working this is organically — I never noticed it, as I said, until this morning.
Doing a cursory search, nobody is freaking out and there hasn’t been any direct reference to advertising on Twitter short of a coy post on May 20 — Does Twitter Hate Advertising?, “Do we hate advertising? Of course not. It’s a huge industry filled with creativity and inspiration. There’s also room for new innovation in advertising, marketing, and public relations and Twitter is already part of that.”
So, no direct mention of the “sponsored definition” campaign. Very smooth and with zero blowback.
That said, if you have a Twitter app or service and want to get into the loop, I guess you should reach out to Federated Media, though I wonder if there might be a secret handshake or password to get yourself into an ad on Twitter.
And, to look at the Twitter-to-come, Seth Simonds also mentions that there are proper 185px ×185px image ads showing on Twitter Japan, which you can see for yourself, “You can see for yourself by visiting the account settings of your Twitter account and changing the language preference to Japanese.” — in this case, the ad is static and sells Windows 7 and Windows Vista from the Japanese Microsoft Store.
Very interesting. What do you think? (Via Socialmedia.biz)
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With all the busyness and business here at Abraham Harrison LLC, I have not stopped, breathed, and shared something that I find to be really cool: we’re doing digital PR and blogger outreach in several foreign languages on behalf of our clients!
Currently, we’re doing a blogger outreach and social media campaign on behalf of OLX in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. In July, we’ll be adding Russian into the mix; in August, we’ll be adding Polish. Last year, we did a crisis management and online reputation defense campaign for a financial services client in German and French as well, in addition to English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
We really enjoy doing these these multinational, multilingual, and multicultural campaigns because we have staff all over the world, in seven countries on four continents. Our CEO, Mark Harrison, is a polyglot, with German his co-fluent language – he is in Berlin, our European base – additionally, he speaks Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Swahili.
While there most surely are quite a few cultural differences (call or email us for many funny examples), the Internet community has an over-arching global protocol, which I argue is simply “being human”: one needs to listen, be responsive, engage on a human level, and always assume good intent — especially when it comes to earned media blogger campaigns. This works worldwide.
Logistically, the most important hire for our foreign language campaigns is the native-speaker project lead in each language, especially in the languages that you and your polyglot CEO can’t read. Just because you can read, write, and/or speak fluent [insert language here] it doesn’t mean you think like [insert nationality here]. The cultural knowledge, and the “nativeness” of the (written) voice are very import to getting the communications across most effectively.
It is essential to work directly with a native-speaker who is well in touch with his/her native culture. When doing communications work internationally, how you say something is as important as what you say.
Also, technologically, it is essential to make certain you have your email solution set up to support 8-bit character sets and that you have tested and re-tested because having Cyrillic or Kanji arrive corrupted or poorly-rendered is unacceptable.
Test, retest, consult an expert. When it comes to reducing accented and special-character Roman characters to ASCII, Internet denizens are sort of used to it, be it turning the German “ß” (ess-zett) to “ss” or realizing that much of the world doesn’t use our quotes but often uses <<>> or ‘ ’.
Additionally, numbers are rendered differently in different languages, such as “€10,00″ instead of “€10.00″ and the like. These are the gaffs that make you seem like you don’t know what you’re doing – and as if you are not taking the time to respect the reader.
At the end of the day, don’t let these details prevent you from giving it a go. The big secret is that there is a vibrant blogosphere, Twittersphere, and forumsphere everywhere now, no matter what anyone says or thinks they know.
Since I recently spent a year in Berlin, I know that I have heard this a hundred times, “what you’re doing in the US with bloggers is very cool, but in Germany there are very few bloggers and they’re all friends and they’re very cliquey and it would never work here,” which is, strangely enough, what everyone I have spoken to says about their country’s bloggers, including the United Kingdom, which is patently untrue. Every new country we begin interacting with we discover has a whole world of bloggers, etc. outside these supposed monolithic A-list cliques. It’s just that no one seems to be making the effort to check if the consensus reality is the truth, or is actually the Emperor’s new clothes.
We’re having a lot of fun on these campaigns and expect to begin new campaigns in German and French as well in the short-term as well.
If you would like more information on what we do or if you would like to set up a call, please email me at chris.abraham@abrahamharrison.com or call our main line, +1 202-657-4769 and we’d be happy to help.
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Shereen from Invesp Consulting let me know about his company’s new blog ranking service, BlogRank. I looked up this blog, Abraham Harrison’s corporate blog, Marketing Conversation, in the ranking and I discovered that MC is currently rated #61rd PR blog, #58th branding blog, #155th social media blog, and #153th marketing blog! Check it out — how did you do? Also, check out how my personal blog, Because the Medium is the Message, is doing on this list.
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Please check out my latest post on Advertising Age Digital Next, Twitter Is What Second Life Wasn’t: Light, Cheap and Open:
I run into many skeptics who believe that Twitter is rife with the sort of hype associated with the ascent and crash of Second Life. This is not true. Twitter is suffused with hype, for sure, but it is a much different and more sustainable hype than Second Life.
Here’s why: Twitter is light, cheap, open and permanent, whereas Second Life is heavy, expensive, closed and ephemeral. Twitter does things right where Second Life failed.
Second Life is amazingly heavy, requiring lots of computer, lots of bandwidth and a commitment to client software. Second Life is a closed system, a walled city, completely invisible to serendipity and coincidence. Second Life is greedy, pushing avarice and commerce. Second Life is ephemeral and anti-textual, meaning that all of the work and energy one spent on Second Life invariably went away the moment people stopped investing time and money into the platform. While there was a programming language, a scripting language and lots of room for creativity, Second Life was not nearly as agnostic and open a platform as it could have been.
On the other hand, Twitter is open and has a fantastically generous API (an open API as opposed to a closed API, which is why so many developers have created such useful applications on top of the service). Twitter is highly textual, highly contagious and very much real time.
Consider its effect on content discovery. Google, the search king, always wants to know it is up to date, that it is on top of everything. It’s constantly insecure that it will lose the war to upstarts. And when it comes to zeitgeist 2.0 — real-time trend tracking and trend recognition — Twitter moves even faster than breaking news scrawls and updates.
The most famous example is the rapidity with which the Twittersphere responds to tragic events like earthquakes, tornadoes, and terrorist events like the shootings in #mumbai and the #iranelection.
For a second, let’s forget Twitter the website and look at how differently people access and engage with Twitter. Not only can one interface via the web or SMS, but there are also hundreds of desktop clients, iPhone and smart phone apps, and third-party mashups of sites and services.
That’s what’s funny: A large proportion of the API calls to Twitter these days aren’t even made by humans twittering all day long. Rather, they’re made by third-party search engines and services offering sundry services: finding friends, tracking news, graphing conversation, tracking searches, plotting trends, collecting metrics, following people, un-following people.
In many ways, the Twitter platform has become almost a fungible input-output flow of data, like IP, tap water, or the electrical mains — all the creativity and all of the development is happening as a result of this relatively featureless and structure-less raw platform.
Everybody admits that the elegance of Facebook’s interface does an amazing job of hand-holding the diverse levels of technological prowess that Facebook users possess. However, Facebook shares many things in common with Second Life: It is a walled-garden, cliquey and hard to cross-pollinate. And finally, Facebook works very hard at defining what the user experience is to the best of its ability in a world where openness and open access can often work for you instead of against you.
The biggest mistake that social network services and online virtual communities make is being too invested in the outcome of how the community will grow and develop. To be successful in community development and community creation, one must be committed to the community and meeting their needs versus being committed to giving them what the community producer thinks the community wants and needs — often very different things.
At the end of the day, Twitter has always been more like the cardboard box holding the toy than the toy itself. Twitter seems to have built the perfect box to play in and with until you decide what sort of toy you want to build — and then Twitter makes it possible for everyone and his brother to take a go at building the toy in the box, always just focusing on being the most amusing, easy-to-use, scalable and compelling box possible.
To me, Twitter is a lot like IRC from back in the day. When you install Internet Relay Chat, there are no rooms and there are no members. Only by engaging and by creating rooms and groups does it become truly useful. (Twitter and IRC share the same conventions in terms of using the hash, #, to indicate a self-organizing group that only exists as long as people choose to use it.)
The strange thing is is that Twitter is one of the very few applications — Web 2.0 or not — that gets the benefit of everybody trying to train each other via — believe it or not — morning talk shows, news spots, news specials, local get-togethers. Oprah! Ellen! The View! I mean, how many dot-com/Web 2.0 platforms have the benefit of that? On the flip side, the downside to Twitter’s choosing not to carefully control every aspect of the user experience is that it’s not always intuitive or apparent how to use it. The third-party apps may be more useful, but most newbies begin their experience at Twitter.com.
People who don’t get Twitter really have not spent enough time with it. There are tons of ways people can use Twitter: Many people use Twitter as an alternative to an RSS feed news reader, following Twitter feeds of news organizations and news alerts, including links and so forth. Twitter doesn’t care how you use it: passive reading or active conversation.
In fact, Twitter is such a neutral solution that you might very well forget that you’re a member, which is why there might be a perception that over 60 percent of all of the users who visit the site don’t go back the next month: Twitter doesn’t want to be too much trouble.
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Chris Abraham, president of the digital-PR firm Abraham Harrison, is a blogger who specializes in social-media marketing with a focus on blogger outreach, blogger engagement and search-reputation management. Chris lives in Berlin and Washington and can be reached via Twitter, Facebook, or email.
Via Advertising Age Digital Next
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Thanks so much to everyone who blogged and Twittered about the Fresh Air Fund in the last two months, May and June. All-together, the Fresh Air Fund and Abraham Harrison has been blessed with at least 286 earned-media mentions. We appreciate your support, your words, your time, and your attention. We are much obliged.
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Abraham Harrison a digital PR, reputation defense, and brand marketing firm looking for an experienced closer to work on a draw-plus-commission basis.
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I heart Facebook. This morning I awoke to Yet Another Facebook Innovation (YAFI). Facebook amazes me because they are driven to make things easier for me — or at least give it a go. Facebook is willing to suffer constant backlash in order to improve usability and efficiency. Case-in-point below:
In this particular case, the innovation is what I call a “Twitterish” innovation — stealing something directly from Twitter. A couple weeks ago, I stayed up until 12:01AM to secure another hype-drenched Twitterish innovation: vanity URLS: facebook.com/chrisabraham — I am such a sucker!
However, Facebook is an equal-opportunity thief and also quite creative as well. Next innovation inspired by Utterli, FriendFeed, or LinkedIn? Who knows!
I hate to admit it but I am used to lazy web applications. I am used to apps like Flickr, Delicious, Craigslist, Ebay, MySpace, Twitter, and YouTube — sites that are pretty much the same as they were when they were born. Facebook, on the other hand, innovates almost constantly. In fact, Facebook tends to innovate so aggressively that there are millions of members who constantly picket Facebook to revert itself to the way it was when it was a college-only service. The reason why most apps don’t innovate is because of this vocal minority — the change-averse.
Another thing I love about Facebook is that they’re not wed to their innovations. When Facebook Beacon pissed off the world, they scaled it back. The developers at Facebook are smart — land grab with ten new innovations, throw them agains the Wall, and then see what people adopt and then, over time, remove the fails.
Facebook is willing to spitball, Facebook is willing to steal ideas shamelessly from other platforms, and Facebook is willing to fail fast and move on. That’s what you’re supposed to do! That’s why I love Facebook.
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Why I Love to Blog: Witness the Passion!
by Chris Abraham on July 1, 2009 · 5 comments
When I wrote Twitter Is What Second Life Wasn’t: Light, Cheap and Open I was addressing something simple:
Well, I forgot how passionate Second Lifers are and so it goes. So it was delicious to discover the 20-or-so comments in response to my recent AdAge DigitalNext article. Here’s the comments through to today:
[click to continue…]
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