With all that IPO pumping, the quaint little twitter blue bird is going to be sporting some new duds
cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by green kozi
Make no mistake about it, according to a recent Forbes piece Can Twitter Save TV?:
Twitter’s message to the networks is different, and it comes in well short of 140 characters: We come in peace; let’s make money together. Lots of tweeting when a show first airs transforms TV into what it used to be: an event, that others scramble to join live. Live, of course, means you can’t skip the commercial (which separately explains the soaring prices of sports programming rights). And when the commercial is followed up by an ad on Twitter, the company says, the viewer proves more likely to buy what’s being advertised. “We help marketers win the moment,” says Adam Bain, the company’s head of revenue.
And guess what you, humble lunch tweeter, or hash tag genius, get as “marketers win the moment”? Twitter isn’t here for you.
The premise is (if I have figured out all the buzz speak) Twitter aggressively encourages shows and actors to tweet crafted messages that drive viewers to watch shows, and advertisers back up the money truck to the networks. Do you remember when the prompt for twitter was “What’s on your mind?” now the aim is “What can I tweet that is going to drive eyeballs there?”
The same article more or less graces Fast Company’s “Converting the Flock”. What counts as success here is How actress Kerry Washington (new name to me) star of a sexy Beltway soap (gag) called Scandal (ditto on new to me) is now a Twitter darling of live tweeting from the production stage.
She even wrote sample tweets for her reticent costar Tony Goldwyn and put them in his draft folder so all he had to do was click during the broadcast.
I am getting a real sense of who this people are from the way they express themselves. The Twitter team coached Vatican cardinals and the Pope Hisself how to tweet.
Twitter bought a company named Bluefin Labs for $80 million… we are not talking about guys in a garage here. These are the games played hard and fast by suits. New CEO Dick Costolo “came into his job with a single mission: to make money.” One of their other company purchases
brought with it a product named Curatorr, which lets brands, media companies, and advertisers create preloaded Twitter streams that can be embedded on websites, tablets, and television.
The new money making Twitter is going to be calculated, crafted, and aimed specifically at messages that benefit advertising.
Lunch tweets are going to be a quaint thing of the past, it’s all about tie ins (my emphasis):
These TV partnerships are a small part of their revenues but a huge part of their sales and PR strategy. They’re changing Twitter to be this really smart, topical, content-based. strategic place for advertisers to be as opposed to a bunch of noise and blather.
That noise and blather? That’s you and me.
It’s a whole new age for Twitter, can’t wait.
cc licensed ( BY ND ) flickr photo shared by Sharon Terry
Live tweeting during TV shows must have been spawned by the longtime practice of academics using Twitter as the “back channel” at conferences and in classrooms. Finally some enterprising suit saw the potential for live tweeting at commercial events. It was only a matter of time.
I knew that’s where it came from! Academics again get their IP stolen.
It didn’t ever occur to me that Twitter was in it for altruistic, non-profit reasons. No money? Why bother? If I don’t get a paycheck, I’m not going to show up to teach in the classroom, either.
I do not begrudge an economic model- I hope for people to keep in mind the motivations of the provider of the service, the same as we ought to do for any of ’em.