Church of the Customer Blog
« Twitter & advertising, part 1 | Main | Twitter & advertising, part 2 »
March 25, 2009
Twitter & advertising, part 1
People love Twitter because it's a non-stop cocktail party of conversations. It enables community and idea-sharing, which help form opinions, which create influence.
Advertising has always been about a positive, sometimes over-promising message in the form of an opinion. The one-way nature of advertising prevents dynamic influence, those small, adjusting steps carried out by actual people who reduce the friction of doubt about a product or brand.
Twitter's ability to reduce the friction of connection between company and customer, company and prospect, is its great promise. Those interactions can have ripple effects on forming opinions. For-profit or non-profit, it's not too late to know what people are saying about you on Twitter.
Which leads us to Twitter rolling out its first money-making program.
On Tuesday, it launched ExecTweets, a partner site with Federated Media that aggregates tweets from executives of companies. With Microsoft as its sponsor, ExecTweets featured 77 executives, four of whom were women.
Unsatisfied with this paltry 5% representation rate for a high-profile program (after all, 53% of the people on Twitter are women), I tweeted about it. That provoked a conversation with the hashtag #exectweetsFAIL. Fail is to broken as fail whale is to Twitter being temporarily down, which happens.
Others jumped into the gender-sensitive conversation except @exectweets, which never responded publicly to those of us chatting away. @exectweets did send me a private message: "sorry we don't monitor #exectweetsFAIL."
Sounds like an anti-listening campaign, I replied with a bit of a wink.
"We promised our followers to 'only share the good stuff,'"@exectweets replied, again, only to me.
Hmmm. Only the good stuff. Like an ad campaign.
You can't create a walkie-talkie and expect it to be a bullhorn. Twitter's profound promise is as a central network of conversational synapses that simultaneously spread and influence business, cultural and civic chatter. To stick an advertising billboard in the middle of this beautiful brain, if you will, is to misunderstand its potential.
UPDATE: Check the comment stream for a comment from Federated Media.
Other blogs that reference Twitter & advertising, part 1:
I agree, I also think that the platform is bound to try and fail at a number of possible revenue models before they find the one that works.
"It's the Relationships" is a lesson that ExecTweets needs to learn. Perhaps if they read this article in the WSJ they can learn a little bit about how this works best: http://blogs.wsj.com/management/2009/03/24/the-facebook-generation-vs-the-fortune-500/
I especially like the quote "contribution counts for more than credentials".
Thanks for the excellent article.
Chris
I love how in the first legitimate advertising offering on Twitter, they ignore the conversational intimacy that makes Twitter so useful and turn it into advertising. Great way to listen!
Am I the only one bothered by the 'ur' in the second tweet?
If you're representing a C-Suite level venture, you don't want to use K-Tel level text abbreviations.
I don't know if this makes me want to laugh or cry. Only listening to the "good stuff" - what value does that provide? Surely the opportunity to learn and grow and improve as execs and businesses comes from listening to the "bad stuff" and fixing what you can?
Oy. Great blog post - thanks for bringing this to light.
Kinda disagree. If you don't like how they're using the platform, don't follow them. If they choose to use as a broadcast platform and not a conversation platform, so be it. Everyone has the option to follow or not follow and to engage in conversation or not engage. I don't hold against them that they didn't participate in the FAIL hashtag. The cool thing about twitter that is different from a billboard is you can completely ignore stuff you don't like. Totally your choice. Billboards cannot really be ignored.
What would bug me most is if I developed a relationship with exectweets that was really reciprocal and social and then they switched it up really fast and changed attitude. Like a friend who starts acting bizarrely or breaks your trust. But from the start, exectweets is not hiding who they are. If you don't like it, don't follow. It's pretty easy to cherry pick the best tweeters from the list there and follow individually. fwiw, I highly recommend @daveknox.
I think Kevin has a good point about being in control your own content. They can use the @exectweets account however they want. If they want to make it a broadcast, more power to them.
However, that doesn't mean they couldn't have other accounts to answer support & concerns from the community, much like Zappos and Dell do.
BTW - They don't monitor exectweets either (or they don't do it right) because #exectweetsfail would show up in a search for exectweets by itself. Just a side note.
Hang on! We’re listening, we’re listening! We hear you loud and clear and, what’s more, we completely agree. The original list was but a start and we hope the community continues to suggest executives to be included in the site. Yesterday, we incorporated your feedback by taking very public steps to ask the community for nominations of top female executives (via @exectweets). See here: http://twitter.com/exectweets/status/1385786333, http://twitter.com/exectweets/status/1383404493, http://twitter.com/exectweets/status/1383273120.
We have every hope that the list of execs included in ExecTweets is as representative of the community as it can possibly be. Sincerely, we appreciate your feedback and have taken steps to make it right.
A couple of things I’d like to clear up:
The “only the goodstuff” comment: What we meant to say was (and tried to say, but worded it badly), was that the @exectweets feed is where we share the most insightful business-oriented tweets from top executives (just a few per day).
As for the #exectweetsFAIL monitoring: we hear you and we are listening. However, due to the popularity of the site, we have an automated system that captures nominations via @exectweets. We suggested #exectweetsWIN with a wink.
Matthew DiPietro, Federated Media (and ExecTweets)
Matthew,
Thanks much for your quick response and comments. I appreciate you addressing the issues.
However the tweets you list did not address the issue we were discussing: why the list has only 4 out of 77 women execs on it? If 53% of Twitter users are women, how could that be representative? Surely there are more than 4 female execs out there on Twitter with insightful things to say. I'd say the list was poorly thought out.
The tweet back to @jeanniecw was to take her recommendation for execs to be added to the list. That was good but still didn't show that you had seen the issue being discussed. The tweet about ADA Lovelace Day just appeared on @exectweets after @conniereece called you out on the irony of grossly under-representing women on a day when the first programmer in the world (a woman!) was being honored. Twitter etiquette would be to reference @conniereece in your ADA Lovelace tweet. That's usually how you show you are listening on Twitter.
Matt, as the comments here are saying, if you put an entity/person out on Twitter, the community is going to want to converse with you. We were surprised and baffled when that didn't happen.
Jackie
P.S. You mentioned you have taken steps to make the list better. Can you point to those steps? Because this page on your site still has the original 77 male-dominated list: http://www.exectweets.com/about/
Kevin and Chris,
I agree with you wholeheartedy that @exectweets can do whatever they want with their Twitter channel. And yes, I don't have to follow them.
But if you decide to be a broadcast channel on the most conversational medium in the world, you should expect to be called out when we try to talk to you and you don't talk back.
This is not a question of whether to follow the @exectweets account or not. It's about a paid advertisement that appears on every single one of our Twitter pages. (If you read Twitter on the Web; you wouldn't see this in TweetDeck or Twhirl, for example.) We're free not to click on it, but we can't remove it as we can with Facebook ads, for example.
I'm glad Federated has responded so promptly, but as Jackie has said, they still haven't addressed the real concern: Who picked the 77 executives and why were only 4 of them women? And when people began to suggest women executives to add, why were they ignored? We're not asking for a quota of 53% women executives on @exectweets, but c'mon ... 4 out of 77?
Talk about missing a marketing opportunity. As Jackie and I tried to point out, this debuted on a day when we were celebrating the first computer programmer -- a woman -- and the tie-in w/ Microsoft and Twitter could have been huge. Many of us would have been tweeting and retweeting the @exectweets ad if they had responded to what were some very reasonable suggestions.
Jackie and Connie –
Agreed! Yes. We hear you. The original list was not representative and it should have been. That’s what we’re trying to fix by soliciting recommendations for female executives. The original list was created very anecdotally and was meant as only the seed of what was to become a much larger list – one created via the feedback from the community, which we are doing right now. ExecTweets is a living thing and we are improving it everyday based on feedback from folks like you.
It sounds to me like part of the rub here is that there was an expectation that @exectweets would be directly involved in the conversation. Terribly sorry for any confusion there. I hear you for sure, but we designed the service in such a way that @exectweets is simply a listening and broadcasting tool set up so we could 1) take nominations for executives and 2) broadcast a few particularly good tweets per day. We departed from that policy a bit yesterday so that we could actively solicit for female execs per your suggestion. (And Connie – I promise you nobody is being ignored. We’re accepting and examining every nomination).
The site was created so you could find, follow and engage with executives on Twitter. The real conversation is happening on the site between all of the executives included on the site via the nomination process, and all of the thousands of tweeters who have found, followed and engaged with them.
Here are some of the the female executive tweeters we’ve added to the list over the last 24 hours. Please (everyone), keep them coming. This list is of course included in the ExecTweets feed and we’re updating the About page as we can. Some recently added: @eanniecw, @ginidietrich, @acce, @tivogrrl, @stevenrothberg, @bellerin, @vfielding, @JulieSmolyansky, @drval, @jillwhalen, @CommunispaceCEO, @barb_iverson. Many more to come!
Matthew,
Thanks again for your comments. You are right...the confusion is around @exectweets functioning as a "listening and broadcasting tool." That wasn't clear.
Usually, the expectation on Twitter is that the person behind the account would respond as well.
By the way, Jackie (and Matthew) -- I'm sure @jeanniecw, @ginidietrich, et al. were added . . . but as of this moment, the About page hasn't been updated to reflect that.
:-|
At first blush, the broadcasting feels like they're forcing their will on the medium, instead of embracing what the medium is about. We'll see.
