For any of you steady Twitter users, you might have noticed something interesting on the Trending Topics recently. Toy Story 3, which was released June 18, had a little gold box next to it on the site. In the box it says "Promoted." You can click on it. When you do, you are taken to the hashtag (#) search of Toy Story 3 or #toystory3. Under each tweet it says "Promoted by Disney.Pixar" in the same gold box. Essentially, instead of having advertisements, Twitter is allowing companies to pay to use its site for promotion of their products via Trending Topics. I'm pretty glad that this beaurocratic invasion of cyberspace isn't coming in a form like Facebook's advertising, which not only flashes in front of your eyes but also targets you via your age, interests, gender, et cetera... Did you know that switching Twitter into the Japanese language causes a huge advertisement above your personal information on the right sidebar to appear? Only in Japanese, though. Interesting.
Anyway, I think this helps PR gain something that might have been lost with the emergence of all this social media and self-promoting. Promoted links allow the company to attach its brand name to something as flimsy as a Trending Topic on Twitter. And that goes a long way. It puts much more control in the company because it's paying to see it's product being discussed on Twitter. And because it's "Promoted," the company is more likely to pay attention of the tweets of users/ viewers who were either satisfied or discontent with the product. I think that knowing that Disney.Pixar cares enough to pay for a link on Twitter makes users more willing to mention it in their tweets. I like this new system very much, but I believe that in the future it's not going to be enough. Corporations are going to realize that the online community is growing and eventually Twitter is probably going to turn into another Facebook with target advertising. In the meantime, this is a big step for Twitter and it's not too much of an inconvenience for the users, either.
read Twitter's blog post about Promoted links here:
http://bit.ly/bkPDOf
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2 comments:
I don't think it's an issue of inconveniencing the users. In fact, it may very well be useful. Say you want to know when the next Twilight movie comes out or something, all you have to do is click on the trending topic and BOOM there's your answer. Could you easily find this information elsewhere? Sure. But you could also probably find information or opinions you wouldn't have stumbled upon otherwise. Perhaps it would make for more interesting conversations and people could see what their peers are thinking about, therefore serving as useful market information for the companies backing the trend.
That being said, I can't help but feel the tiniest bit uneasy about this. While it is indeed a big step for Twitter and one that is undoubtedly going to bring them a nice pile of cash, I can't help but feel that it's slightly impinging upon the site's integrity. It was supposed to be about the topics WE want to discuss, sans prompting. Wouldn't Toy Story 3 or something that popular likely be a trending topic anyway? If companies promote topics that aren't that popular to begin with, will it still do them any good? In a perfect world, we would only see tweets regarding naturally relevant topics, not ones that were thrust upon us by advertisers. Is it the end of the world? No. Does it have its advantages? Sure. It's just disheartening to see that everything eventually puts its hand in the advertising cookie jar.
I wonder if companies who use promoted tags look to see what tweeps are already using to describe the trending topic. For example, were anxious fans already using something like #TS3 when talking about Toy Story Three? Twitter moves faster than facebook, so there's not the same danger of losing fans when starting a promoted trending topic, but it seems smart to listen to the groundswell, as our book would say. Also, if something is already trending, I guess there's no reason to promote it, right?
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