I came across this news announcement this morning about Twitter changing their policies and now allowing advertising. You can read the news release here. I think this is an interesting development for a few reasons. First, some of the most successful advertising on the web has been content based, which means that the the advertiser generally tries to match up ads with the content that is most closely associated with it.
As people read content or search for specific items they are served up ads that relate to what they are reading or searching for in many cases. Most people probably look at this as yet another source of information or products related to what they are doing at the moment. However I am not sure how that would work on Twitter. With so many tweets going on about different topics and different people chiming in at any given time I think it may be more difficult to serve up ads that are relative to the conversation at any given time. In my opinion that may depress the response of those ads. Of course as a direct marketer I never know the answer to these types of questions without actually testing it, but it certainly seems logical that this is a distinct possibility.
In the release Sean Corcoran, analyst at Forrester, said "You can combine research and public relations and CRM and direct marketing in one place, both quantitatively and qualitatively, which is very strong," I agree with this up to his comment about direct marketing. Direct marketing is a very different animal than PR. At the moment I am not sure how he is making the leap that this move by Twitter incorporates direct marketing. In fact, I think that it is the direct marketing element that may be missing from the equation as stated above.
However the concept of linking CRM and PR together is extremely intriguing. Typical CRM data comes from touches with a customer as a the result of delivering a product or service to a customer from departments like sales, marketing, shipping, accounting, etc., but typically not PR. I happen to be of the school of thought that social media is revolutionizing the way we learn about customer wants and needs to be able to gather that information and somehow integrate it into CRM gives a much more full picture of a customer than marketers may have had before.
It will be interesting to see how this change in Twitter actually turns out and what the benefits ultimately become.
