A Twit­ter Spon­sored Definition

There has been so much con­jec­ture as to how Twit­ter will start mon­e­tiz­ing.  Well, it looks like there have been a few baby steps in the form of “spon­sored def­i­n­i­tions” that cycle through right above the Home link on the nav­i­ga­tion bar. It is very sub­tle and I didn’t notice it myself until today (Seth Simonds has been talk­ing about this since June 23rd).

You won’t see these spon­sored def­i­n­i­tions every time as they’re inter­spersed with Twit­ter def­i­n­i­tions that are not spon­sored but sim­ply infor­ma­tional or help­ful, I guess.  An exam­ple of a spon­sored def­i­n­i­tion is Exec Tweets and Cin­ema Tweets — essen­tially text ads in the guise of being fac­toids and links to use­ful apps and services.

Accord­ing to a blog post I found on blog.twitter.com from back in March, it looks like Fed­er­ated Media is han­dling the Twit­ter spon­sored def­i­n­i­tions, “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,” which could be a real score for Federated.

Twit­ter has done a very good job of work­ing this is organ­i­cally — I never noticed it, as I said, until this morning.

Doing a cur­sory search, nobody is freak­ing out and there hasn’t been any direct ref­er­ence to adver­tis­ing on Twit­ter short of a coy post on May 20 — Does Twit­ter Hate Adver­tis­ing?, “Do we hate adver­tis­ing? Of course not. It’s a huge indus­try filled with cre­ativ­ity and inspi­ra­tion. There’s also room for new inno­va­tion in adver­tis­ing, mar­ket­ing, and pub­lic rela­tions and Twit­ter is already part of that.”

Twit­ter Ban­ner Ad Served in Japan

So, no direct men­tion of the “spon­sored def­i­n­i­tion” cam­paign.  Very smooth and with zero blowback.

That said, if you have a Twit­ter app or ser­vice and want to get into the loop, I guess you should reach out to Fed­er­ated Media, though I won­der if there might be a secret hand­shake or pass­word to get your­self into an ad on Twitter.

And, to look at the Twitter-to-come, Seth Simonds also men­tions that there are proper 185px ×185px image ads show­ing on Twit­ter Japan, which you can see for your­self, “You can see for your­self by vis­it­ing the account set­tings of your Twit­ter account and chang­ing the lan­guage pref­er­ence to Japan­ese.” — in this case, the ad is sta­tic and sells Win­dows 7 and Win­dows Vista from the Japan­ese Microsoft Store.

Very inter­est­ing.  What do you think?Chris Abra­ham is co-founder and prin­ci­pal of Abra­ham Har­ri­son LLC, an inter­na­tional con­sult­ing group with spe­cial­ties in online word-of-mouth/conversation mar­ket­ing and online busi­ness & tech­nol­ogy strat­egy advis­ing. See his pro­file, con­tact Chris via email, Twit­ter, or leave a com­ment below.

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