On April 13th, 2010, the social juggernaut twitter.com announced its first attempt at monetization with the promoted tweet platform. Initially launched in 2006, Twitter has built a worldwide membership of over 75 million users (22 million or so of which are actually active). The problem, however, has always been how to make the service generate revenue.

With the announcement of promoted tweets, Twitter thinks it has the answer. The system will initially be available to only a select group of national brands, including Starbucks, Virgin, Sony and 7 other internationally recognized brands.

The response to the launch has been generally positive, although questions are being raised as to why it was so restricted to such a small initial base of corporate advertisers. One has to ask, considering Twitter is such an edge technology with most of its user base as early adopters and technophiles, why it took such a conventional approach with this launch. It seems like a much more appropriate first run of the service would be open to a larger advertising community. Allowing access to smaller companies would introduce considerably more diversity to the promoted tweet landscape and generate more results that had much less of a “spammy” feel.

Regardless, this development should be lucrative for both Twitter and their advertisers… what do you think?

I try to travel to entrepreneurial hotspots as often as I can to keep my motivation and skill set high. The run is usually between the east coast (usually nyc) and Silicon Valley. This year, as business tends to be slow in January anyway and I have no real interest in winter, I headed off to Mountain View, CA for several weeks to immerse myself in meetups and demos. I love places like Mountain View. Normally when you go to a bar and sit down on a stool, the lateral chatter you unintentionally field has to do with sports, alimony or the mundanities of whatever job the chatterer is tired of. When you sit down at a Mountain View bar, even a rowdy one like Molly McGees on Castro, all the conversations around you things like “…it sounds really interesting, but how is he going to monetize…” or “…they got seeded by YC and they’re working on closing their second round with Sequoia…”.
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I give a lot of presentations on blogging and social networking and a theme that seems to consistently recur is people telling me “I’ve tried to use social networks, but I don’t ever seem to get any result from them.”. Looking a little deeper into what they’ve been posting and how they’ve been using social media has given me some insight into why they’re not getting the kind of results they’d like to see.

What I’ve seen is that, even though people are using social media, they’re not changing their paradigm in respect to what they’re posting. Social media won’t work if you just use it to push the same old tired marketing messages. YOU CAN’T WRITE COPY AND EXPECT RESULTS FROM SOCIAL MEDIA!
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