THE DREAM IN ACTION

Last week I got an email that requested that I post a very specific tweet to my followers. In fact I would not have the option to tweak or edit the tweet at all, but they were willing to reward me for it, with cash. I’ve gotten a lot of request in the past to tweet people’s website URL or blog post but this was different.

This request came from Ad.ly, the in stream advertising company that is run and was started by a friend of mine Sean Rad. Sean was funded last year by a very well respected VC, Mark Suster of GRP. What I really like about what Sean is building is his focus on “streams” and not only Twitter. Obviously, Twitter is the webs strongest stream today, but many services are going to the stream model & this will be a huge opportunity.

This is the email that I received, a request to tweet this appropriately called out (Ad) for a total of $4.23. So, as a starving entrepreneur I decided to get my $4 bucks.

I clicked ‘Approve’ shortly after I got the email and this was the result…

For $4 bucks, I’d say it was totally worth the tweet. I do think it would be a pretty shady practice if that little “(Ad)” was not included in the tweet however.

Maybe the most interesting realization after the tweet was to see my friends/followers respond to the tweet. I had about 2 people tweet me to call me out for selling out my stream, 1 person who thought my account was jeopardized or hacked and then friends just curious about my tweeting ads. Friendly concern.

So, would I tweet more ads in the future? Possibly. I can tell you that I’ve turned a couple other tweet requests down, so I won’t be tweeting just anything (my stream is respected, I love you guys) so I’ll keep it pretty clean. However, I’m not apposed if I’ve used the services that are included in the sponsored tweets.

Twitters Solution

Twitter is executing a similar behavior by promoting tweets within Twitter searches. I’m still skeptical about how much people actually use Twitter to search, but like anything the search behavior on Twitter, will grow. Twitter posted on their blog this answer to the question about promoted tweets.

Q: What are you launching? What are Promoted Tweets?
A: We are launching the first phase of our Promoted Tweets platform with a handful of innovative advertising partners that include Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America—with more to come. Promoted Tweets are ordinary Tweets that businesses and organizations want to highlight to a wider group of users.

What this means is that when someone searches for “coffee”, Starbucks will have a tweet (like the one above) that regardless of timing of that tweet it will stay at the top of that search. The kicker here is that the Starbucks tweet will NOT be to the side like a Google ad, these tweets will be “in stream”, just like Ad.ly.

I do think, for the record, that there is plenty of space for third party in stream advertising regardless of Twitters entrance to the space.