ExecTweets

This morning marks the launch of ExecTweets, a platform my company has built working with Microsoft, its sponsor, and Twitter. I’m proud of the work here, it reflects a lot of thinking about how to use conversations like Twitter to fuel what I hope is a value-added experience. In this case, we’re filtering for business-realated content from senior execs in various industries, like retail, healthcare, government, and more, and we’ve created a platform for community conversation, voting, input, and recommendations. (FM blog post here).

It’s a first effort, and we’re already working on the next iteration. Microsoft has been a great partner because they understand the concept of marketing as conversational media, not just as “campaigns to be flighted.” And it’s been great to work with Twitter, which in its blog post announcing ExecTweets notes: “our focused commitment to Twitter itself means we don’t have much time or resources to build these interesting topical experiences. It turns out the folks over at Federated Media have both the resources and the expertise. So if you’re a major brand and you want to sponsor a topic-focused social media experience with Twitter, we suggest Federated Media—they’ll fix you up right.”

Appreciate the shout out. And yes, as Mashable notes, this is partially a business model for Twitter, but it’s not one of the major legs of the stool, (directionally, it is for FM, but it’s not a cornerstone for Twitter – more of my thoughts on TweetSense and other Twitter models here). Twitter has a history of promoting applications and projects they think are interesting, relevant, or valuable regardless of any financial arrangement. Federated Media felt that Twitter should share some of the revenue associated with ExecTweets since this project is made possible using their open platform.

We hope to do a lot more projects along these lines, please let me know what you think, and how we can improve them.