Speculation is rife that Twitter and Google are possibly in serious discussions about an acquisition. (No, it’s not April Fool’s Day anymore). Others say there’s no deal on the table at all.
Well, of course they are talking, both parties would be crazy not to be at least doing that. (See Twitter = YouTube, et al). What I do know is that Google is testing a Twitter-related ad product through its AdSense network. That one you can take to the bank. It’s not particularly innovative* – it lets brands run a Twitter feed through their Adsense buy, from what I’ve heard, but at least it shows Google sees Twitter as worthy of grokking.
More on this when I have the time to write it down.
*Running feeds in ads is something FM has done for three years, and we are doing with ExecTweets now.
The idea that Google’s first integration with Twitter would be tweeting through AdSense epitomizes how severely Google doesn’t “get” Twitter. Maybe the execution will be fantastic, but I can’t think of a less compelling integration between the two.
Google’s already killed Jaiku and Dodgeball, here’s hoping they don’t get the chance to do the same to Twitter. Thanks for the tip, John!
Ad Age has more detail on this:
http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=135758
and to be completely self-serving, here’s my mind-blowingly wonderful post connecting all these dots:
http://industry.bnet.com/media/10001573/google-buying-twitter-rumor-highlights-twitters-business-model/
It’s a joke but they say rss feeds with a twitter search query is definitely relevant content.
I read that a company (I can’t remember the name) is the first customer to combine Twitter with the Adsense network. If I remember correctly, the last 5 tweets of the advertiser will be seen across Google’s Adsense network as Adsense Ads.
So was that an April fools?
Thanks for sharing.
Karl
Thank You..
Google are so big, but think about little project like exalead or the new mooveOn.net
Google don’t need to make a deal with Twitter to benefit from selling ads alongside tweets. As Twitter Search has an API and Adsense can be placed on any page, Google should leave content producers to do their work for them as with Twitseek.
Thanks for posting John. I believe a lot of marketers are going to be worried if conversational marketing comes to the inevitable fruition you spell out in your posts. One of the items we bank on is it takes a while to build up relevancy within the classic ‘static’ engines. In essence, we can buy some time because it takes a while for the more real time topics to come to the top of search results assuming there’s other relevant content about our brand that people have seen and clicked on in the past.
Even those brands which are trying to be progressive about conversations online are typically not well equipped to deal with the real time changes that would take place in conversational search.
It may be inevitable but as marketers begin to understand this fundamental shift in what is and was a very safe digital channel, their collective feelings towards search may begin to waver. How that would posaibly change budget allocation I don’t pretend to know but I do believe they wouldn’t be pumped to know it was entwined with a heavy dose of user initiated brand feedback.
This is an interesting concept, and it’s refreshing to see this level of transparency in paid placements. It brings to bear a couple questions… 1) the quality of the content is going to determine the impact and ROI, and since many tweets tend to be cryptic at best, the return on this campaign may be questionable after the halo of novelty wears off. 2) Tweet streams typically consist of a number of retweets and replies; are copyright and permission issues being taken into account? Does an individual’s engagement in conversation w/ a brand on Twitter give the brand the right to use that conversation in it’s advertising?
Great concept.Thanks.
The thought of contextual advertising for stream-of-consciousness microblogging makes me curious how the actual implementation would play out.