My brother’s band, Freeflowg, is competing for $150,000 prize being given out by Peak 100.9 in Vancouver. In an attempt to sway voters and generate some publicity, they’ve launched some guerrilla marketing campaign involved a “naked suite” – supported by the powers of YouTube. Not sure if it will gain them a lot of votes but you have to admire their, um, tenacity.
advertising
Assetize Aims to Monetize Twitter
For Twitter, advertising is low-hanging fruit to generate revenue. But Twitter continue to insist it’s not something being actively considered. So while Twitter makes up its mind about whether or not to place ads into Twitter streams, there’s a growing number of companies doing just that.
A new player is Toronto-based Assetize, which emerged from Extreme Venture Partners‘ Extreme University, a 12-week program done last summer to nurture and incubate start-ups. Assetize bills itself as a smarter way for advertisers to tap into Twitter because its technology does a much better job of connecting ads to relevant content than players such as Magpie.
Assetize offers a self-service platform for advertisers and Twitter users looking to have ads within their Twitter stream. Using a pay-per-click model, advertising can configure the keywords they want to target and their budgets. For Twitter users, they get paid every time a link with an ad is clicked – much like AdSense on blogs.
Although the platform looks interesting, the biggest challenge facing Assetize is attracting enough advertisers and Twitter users to make it a vibrant platform. With advertising within Twitter still in its infancy, Assetize needs to aggressively move into sales, marketing and education mode to nurture the marketplace.
More: TechCrunch reports that Glam Media is going to be launching a Twitter ad network, while Ad.ly is launching an network to connect high-end brand advertisers with celebrity and high-profile Twitter users.
The Road to meshmarketing
One of the lessons we learned from the last mesh conference is how many people within the public relations, advertising marketing sectors want and need more insight into the right approach, techniques and tools to attack the fast-growing online advertising/marketing marketplace.
As a result, we decided to create meshmarketing, a one-day event on Oct. 22 in downtown Toronto that will, hopefully, provide attendees with a fresh perspective on what’s happening and what they need to do, and how to do it.
We’ve got a great keynote speaker, Hugh MacLeod, two great food-for-thought panels, and eight hands-on, interactive workshops. It should make for a day full of insight, information, perspective and learning.
For more details, check out the mesh blog, as well as the meshmarketing site.
Twitter Isn’t Over-Hyped; It’s Just Misunderstood
A week or so ago, I wrote a post looking at whether the shine was going to come off Twitter soon, and how it appeared that Twitter fatigue was creeping into the scene.
Recently, there have been some articles and blog posts about how anything and everything Twitter is over-reported – another sign that people are tiring of the Twitter story, if not Twitter itself.
Robert Scoble steps into the fray with a solid post about how he believes Twitter is under-hyped, and that it’s just starting to to scratch its potential as a valuable communications, business and marketing tool.
“I’m now convinced that Twitter has locked up a whole raft of businesses and that Twitter is actually worth five to 10 billion dollars,” he says.
Personally, I don’t think Twitter is under-hyped or over-hyped.
Instead, Twitter is just misunderstand – at least for now. Here’s why:
1. The 140-character (or less) limit seems like a restriction to many people. In fact, it’s a way of forcing companies and businesses to get to the point. You have to deliver the message quickly and succinctly without frills or hyperbole.
2. The fact it’s free and shows no signs of having a business model has likely caused many people to think Twitter is just SMS for older people, while teenagers use Facebook and text-messaging.
3. The ROI on Twitter is different from traditional ROI metrics within the marketing and advertising markets where the bottom line is higher sales.
With Twitter, you’re penalized if you blatantly try to sell because Twitter is a conversation medium, not a sales medium. On Twitter, you’re looking to build new and stronger relationships, which could lead to a more enhanced brand, word of mouth and, hopefully, higher sales.
4. Twitter is a platform so it’s a mistake to just focus Twitter itself as opposed to the ecosystem of third-party services built on the Twitter API. In fact, I would argue that the third-party services are far more interesting than Twitter, which continues to be a no-frills service.
5. While high-profile marketers such as Dell, Zappos, Comcast and Ford have embraced Twitter, and received a lot of attention for doing it, the vast majority of companies are still on the sidelines trying to figure out what it’s all about. In time, many of these companies will get Twitter, which will bolster Twitter’s role and value as a marketing and communications platform.
6. Twitter is still new and shiny, and growing like a weed so it’s attracting a lot of attention. In some respects, the tsunami of media and blog coverage has made it challenging for people to get Twitter because there’s just so much information being thrown at them. When the hype disappears, it could become easier for people to get their heads around Twitter the service.
7. From a public relations perspective, Twitter has taken a shotgun approach with its founder – Biz Stone, Ev Williams and Jack Dorsey – doing a flurry of interviews as the mainstream media tries to tell the Twitter story.
In some ways, this has confused many people because there seems to be a new story (e.g. Twitter will never charge people to use the service; Twitter will charge business users; Twitter doesn’t want advertising; Twitter wants advertising, etc.). This has made it hard to get a handle on what Twitter is going to do when it grows up.
7. It’s still early days for Twitter. It’s really only been a year since Twitter has seen strong growth – a report by Sysomos shows that 73% of Twitter users have joined this year. Like many companies and communications mediums, it will change, evolve and improve.
So, what do you think? Is Twitter over-hyped? Is it under-hyped as Scoble contends? Or it is misunderstood?
More: Ken Camp has a good post addressing each of Scoble’s points about Twitter on his blog, Stardust Global Ventures.
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