Metz, The Social Concept

Accidentally Like A Martyr: Twitter Advertising & How To Prepare Your Consumer Brand For This Sub-Strategy

November 23, 2009

Last week was a big week on the social web, especially for large consumer brands. Last Friday, 72 hours after the announcement of Salesforce’s groundbreaking Chatter product (in-house social customer management for SMB/enterprise), Twitter COO Dick Costolo announced that Twitter will turn on an advertising model. According to TechCrunch , “It will be fascinating. Non-traditional. And people will love it… It’s going to be really cool.”

[Last month, Twitter.com had 23 million unique visitors, but the brand still has yet to show a profit. See Warren Zevon demo embedded at end of post – “the greedy just get greedier and the vulnerable get burned.”]

Costolo didn’t distinguish the actual workflow of the ad platform, and didn’t explain whether ads would run side-of-page or side-of-app (in Twitter applications) or within the flow of tweets, or even “in-tweet”. According to TechCrunch, Costolo’s announcement hints at a 60-to-90-day timetable: “Twitter will have an advertising business, ready in the near future, and available to partners”

Previous Twitter advertising opportunities have been sponsored by pay-per-post companies like this one or “social media affinity networks” like this one , and opportunities have typically been sold on a CPT (cost-per-tweet) or CPC (cost-per-click) basis. (CPT is effectively a Twitterified variation of the old Internet CPM [cost per mille] basis).

Keep in mind that Twitter advertising alone is not a Def Leppard strategy, in that advertising on Twitter, or even advertising on English-language social platforms (social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, etc.) is not a #1-hit-single strategy.

At Metz Consulting, it’s our strategic orientation that if a single tactic is not an out-of-the-park home-run, then it can only be deployed as a sub-strategy, in concert with 8-10 other initiatives running in parallel. It would then need to be tested against all 8-10 other (i.e. Facebook ads) for ROI, conversion, virality and return-on-participation (ROP).

What CMOs need to do to prepare for this new social advertising strategy and prepare to engage with Twitter in 2010:

1. Assess 2009 social advertising spend (Q1 to Q3) [perhaps send surveys to multiple business unit heads]

2. Map ROI, ROP (see above), conversion and virality from this spend, by business unit and by social platform

3. Set 2009 benchmarks

4. Deploy Twitter product against current social advertising initiatives for Q1

5. Measure weekly and quarterly

6. Make iterative decision based on quarterly benchmark [around April/May 2010]

To learn more about the scope and size of the social web and plan specific action steps for your consumer brand, please check out our State Of The Social Web webinar on December 1. As of right now, there are 37 tickets left.

One common complaint about previous efforts at Twitter advertising was that response and ROI were sub-optimal. To either have an audit done on previous social advertising that your consumer brand has engaged in or discuss top-line social customer management strategies, get in touch .

*Quick Twitter Timeline: *
October 2008: Twitter CEO Ev Williams re-emerged to the helm of the company a little over a year ago .
August 2009: Twitter announces Project ReTweet
October 2009: Twitter announces deals with Microsoft & Google
November 2009: Twitter announces advertising program

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