140Char

Twittertise is billed as a method of advertising on Twitter, but personally I see it more as a tool to measure the Return on Investment for corporate Twittering - something which arguably has a lot more value than a basic advertising tool. Owner and creator Jon Steinberg got in touch via Twitter, (@jonsteinberg), but it took me a little while to get some questions to him, and I’m glad it did, because this post now coincides with a new release which answers some of the questions I had about the value of the service.

In it’s simplest terms, Twittertise is a free service which builds on Bit.ly url shortening to offer some statistics on referrals through to your website - but the latest release starts to go further than the Bit.ly tool by offering some useful graphing capabilities for overall referrals and individual messages - and graphs are always useful for corporate reporting!

Jon was kind enough to answer some questions about the thinking behind Twittertise, how brands including Comcast, Nortel and the American Cancer Society are using it, and how you could be using it for your company:

Twittertise and Whalewhisdom are both applications by Thursday LLC - can you tell us a bit more about the company, where it’s based, and how many people are behind the applications?

“I think comcastcare’s use during huricane Gustav is my favorite.  Timely messages that needed to be spaced.
http://jonsteinberg.com/post/48213746/comcastcares-using-twittertise-to-send-out-gustav
http://jonsteinberg.com/post/48214167/another-shot-of-comcastcares-using-twittertise
Nortel has also been a consistent and solid user for communicating corporate and product related information and tracking it.
http://twitter.com/nortel
On the non-profit side, I’m proud to see American Cancer Society using:
http://twitter.com/americancancer.”

Thanks to Jon for taking the time to answer a few questions, and I’m definitely planning to follow Twittertise and future releases in detail. One of the biggest problems in social media and social networking is tracking a return on the time invested, and this is one of the tools that will start to make that job easier.

It’s also interesting to note that Jon advises using Twittertise in conjunction with real human tweeting - I’m not a big fan of just plugging in an autofeed and letting it run - it could be really useful to ensure important messages don’t get forgotten or phrased badly in the rush of conversation. And it could also be useful to retweet your most important message when you’ve finished posting for the day to ensure people in different timezones might see your most important messages.

If you liked this post and want to keep up with the latest articles, news, Twitter tools and interviews, why not subscribe to the www.140char.com RSS feed?

And if you missed our earlier interviews why not catch up with them now?

An interview with Blippr founders Jonathan C and Chris Heard.

An interview with Posty creator Cesare Rocchi.

Back in June 2008, Ian Schaefer auctioned his Twitter profile page background for charity. Fast forward to September 2008, and there’s now a way for you to find advertisers willing to pay to display their commercial imagery on your page with Twittad.com. As their tagline says, ‘Let you ad meet Tweets’.

When I blogged about Ian Schaefer’s charity auction, I wondered if it was possible to judge interest in monetisation in this way by doing it for a good cause - something far more likely to lead to high bidding from charitable souls. Now, we can really see whether there is gold in them, thar, backgrounds.

My guess is that it’s unlikely to be sustainable as a business model, but I’m open to being convinced. My theory is based on three  things:

1. It’s going to be almost impossible for advertisers to work out the Return on Investment for placing an advert. Prices are set by users, and at the time of writing, the accounts with advertising booked range from $5 to $30, with a maximum of 351 followers. Assuming a company wants coverage (and at the moment the only ad I’ve seen is the one in their example, for Film Fitt), they’re going to want to know what effect it’s had. It can’t be from click-throughs or page views, because there is no way to measure it. The number of followers is inefficient, because there’s no guarantee any amount of followers will visit the profile page hosting the advertisement. And you could measure an increase above average for the Twitter feed of the company, but that’s fairly inaccurate and hard to pinpoint.

Edit: Twittad CEO James Eliason suggests some solutions on the company blog, including coupon codes, or using a new url to track activity (as when TV ads use .tv to show where the interest came from).

2. For users, it may frustrating that Twitter profiles with a significant following are effectively priced out of the market. If 300 followers can sell for $30, then it’s tempting to sell 1000 followers for $100. But prices vary wildly, from 7144 followers for $140, to $1399 followers for a whopping $1500! So it’ll take a while for the Twitad economy to settle down and establish what a realistic maximum price tends to be.

3. Are there enough advertisers to sustain this type of service? For most mainstream businesses, the concept of Twitter is still a novelty, or an incomprehensible piece of geekery. People like @Zappos and @Comcastcares are written about because their methods stand out. And companies using techniques like those mentioned aren’t likely to find the idea of going from engagement to broadcasting their ads via profiles appealing. Meanwhile the mainstream who are more likely to see broadcasting as easy and attractive are quite happy playing with Adsense, or possibly Facebook.

Having said all that, I’m completely impartial about whether or not Twittads is a success or not. There’s no escaping the fact that various individuals and companies will seek to monetise the time and effort that creating a network on any platform requires, and capitalise on the opportunities it presents. And there’s no moral or ethical reason why an inoffensive advert on a profile page should impair the internet experience for anyone. But it’ll be interesting to see whether Twittads succeeds as is, or evolves further.

If you’re interested, there’s a Twittad blog. I’m intrigued enough to see how much value my 1200 followers creates, so don’t be surprised if I post later pimping my own advert (Of course, you could always beat the rush and contact me first!). After all, you can’t comment on something properly without taking a close look…

It’s the weekend, so I’ve taken a bit of a break from the latest news - yes Twitter is still up and down like the Assyrian Empire, and Plurk is still getting a lot of buzz. See the graph below for blogs mentioning Plurk over the last 30 days:

But in the meantime, I’m adding to the blogroll (See right). We’ve also kicked off the first Plurk pack list we’re aware of, to compile a list of notable Plurkers by discipline, and we’ve started experimenting with listing any microbloggers looking for advertising/sponsorship, and companies looking for microbloggers to fund. So if you’re looking to get paid or sponsored for Twitter, Plurk, Seesmic, Pownce work, then why not list yourself…

Any other suggestions for items to add, or any offers from possible contributors, are always welcome. After all 140 char isn’t just a character limit - 140 contributors (characters!) could be one hell of a resource.