Episode 3: Monetizing the stream
Advertising and/in social media. Monetizing the "social stream." Dave signed up for Ad.ly, and sent a tweet offering the link to his followers. The link he sent was an affiliate link. A few cried foul, and one unfollowed him. No ads have gone out as of yet. Maybe a lot of flitter about nothing? A small subset says "eek" and unfollows when things like this happen. It'll be no more than one tweet in the stream every two days. Sounds un-intrusive given the number of tweets Dave sends out. Michael views Twitter as a personal conversation. Scenario to prove a point: A group of friends are hanging out at a bar, and one stands up and spouts out an a (completely out of context) "Have you heard about the new blah blah blah?" Dave sees that as awkward too, but throws out another scenario or two. No one knows what the ads are going to look like. Maybe it'll contextual, gives a Clooney movie reference. Ad.Ly asked Dave to categorize his tweets, he said only "Film" and as long as ads are centered around cinema it'll be ok. Dave suggests that the friend mentioned above could share the revenue with the table... but that's not the case. It gets fuzzy, and the less you tweet the less annoying it'll be. There's a clear delineation between commercial flavored twitter account, and a personal account. Ads in the commercial flavor might be more acceptable. How does all of this affect those of us that link our twitter accounts to all of our other accounts? Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, MySpace (lol.). What are you trying to accomplish with you social media participation? Dave notes his followers are interested in how he's using SM, and how he's making money. That subset is interested in the ads, from the statistical standpoint. Twitter clients need filtering. If ads were tagged with [adv] then we could filter them out. Problem solved. Tweetie? You listening? Following is black and white right now, and filtering gives us some grey area to play in. Dave follows very few based on his follower count. As does Michael. It's about 3 to 1 for Michael Event hashtags can get annoying, but filters again would fix that issue too. Magpie, Dave signed up for that, no one noticed (except that one guy again). Michael unfollowed plenty of people because his twitter stream was just crammed with people jumping on the Magpie bandwagon. Total insanity. Facebook is doing a great job with ads. They're using and self control, and the user is benefitting. Don't over saturate. Examine the user's twitter stream for relevant ad quantities, say a minimum is 5% of the tweets, and a max of twice a day? Neat idea. People that are 100% in to monetizing the stream aren't people Michael is going to follow anyway. Content needs to be about more than your product of service, then you'll get friends and followers. We have 2 listeners, right? This one is relevant baby! That's a wrap. For more on Dave Taylor, find him at http://davetayloronline.com and for more on Michael, check out http://friendmichael.com
