For the last four years, Twitter makes no money. Today (Tuesday 13, 2010), Twitter announces its Business Model! Promoted tweets are coming in your Twitter feeds even if you use a Twitter client (third party application). Twitter can analyze your tweets, keywords, searches, followers and lists and serve you targeted ads! 

Promoted tweets also have the potential to scale revenue quickly for the company, backed by $160 million in funding from a coterie of elite VC firms including Union Square Ventures, Institutional Ventures Partners, Benchmark Capital and Spark Capital.

The promoted tweet is one of three streams of revenue Twitter will have available, including a data fee from search engines indexing Twitter in real time, such as Google, Yahoo and Bing, and the coming “professional accounts.” Professional accounts will include the ability to have multiple users on one account — much like some of the clients such as CoTweet do today — plus a dashboard that shows what’s happening with a brand on Twitter and integration with promoted tweets.

(AdAge.com)

This is what @biz Stone wrote on Twitter’s Official Blog just an hour ago:

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.

Q. What will users see?
A. You will start to see Tweets promoted by our partner advertisers called out at the top of some Twitter.com search results pages. We strongly believe that Promoted Tweets should be useful to you. We’ll attempt to measure whether the Tweets resonate with users and stop showing Promoted Tweets that don’t resonate. Promoted Tweets will be clearly labeled as “promoted” when an advertiser is paying, but in every other respect they will first exist as regular Tweets and will be organically sent to the timelines of those who follow a brand. Promoted Tweets will also retain all the functionality of a regular Tweet including replying, Retweeting, and favoriting. Only one Promoted Tweet will be displayed on the search results page.

Q. You said, “first phase”; what else do you have planned?
A. Before we roll out more phases, we want to get a better understanding of the resonance of Promoted Tweets, user experience and advertiser value. Once this is done, we plan to allow Promoted Tweets to be shown by Twitter clients and other ecosystem partners and to expand beyond Twitter search, including displaying relevant Promoted Tweets in your timelines in a way that is useful to you.

Q: Is this what you said we would love and would be awesome?
A: While we are excited about the platform in general, there are several specific aspects of the launch that we are delighted to highlight. Since all Promoted Tweets are organic Tweets, there is not a single “ad” in our Promoted Tweets platform that isn’t already an organic part of Twitter. This is distinct from both traditional search advertising and more recent social advertising. Promoted Tweets will also be timely. Like any other Tweet, the connection between you and a Promoted Tweet in real-time provides a powerful means of delivering information relevant to you at the moment.

There is one big difference between a Promoted Tweet and a regular Tweet. Promoted Tweets must meet a higher bar—they must resonate with users. That means if users don’t interact with a Promoted Tweet to allow us to know that the Promoted Tweet is resonating with them, such as replying to it, favoriting it, or Retweeting it, the Promoted Tweet will disappear.

Q. Anything else to say?
A. This is a new thing and we expect to iterate to make it better. We’re really excited to get it out to you and look forward to getting your feedback.

It was about time to see a Social Media campaign coming from the number one refreshment drink in the world. Coca-Cola Company, one of the top global advertisers (mostly in Print and Broadcast media), is going to use Social Media to promote the happiness message around the world. Three guys from Germany, Belgium and Mexico are going to travel around the world visiting 206 countries, where Coca-Cola is sold. They will have cameras, laptops and other gadgets in order to post in Social Media websites the happiness of people around the world. Expedition 206 will last one year and the team will start on January from Madrid, Spain.

Coca-Cola will track the campaign through Facebook fans and friends, Twitter followers and website pageviews. Clyde Tuggle, senior VP-global public affairs and communications says: “The challenge that we put to the communications team was to think about the social and digital media space as a new venue for driving good public relations for the company. The team, which has typically worked in the space of print media and broadcast media was suddenly challenged to go into this new media space and come up with an idea to expand our brand.” (AdAge)

Follow @x206 on twitter and become a fan of their Facebook page.

The idea of traveling around the world is not unique. Let’s see how this campaign will go..

According to many ‘Social Media Gurus’ (if this term exists) you have to build your community in order to be successful! This is not new. The community building happens since the creation of the world. People used to build communities in order to be more powerful and more protected. Some years ago, companies used to build communities through events, exhibitions, sponsorships and many more. Nowadays, the trend is called Social Media. Why? It is easy, inexpensive and with better results. How? It is very easy! You just communicate with your audience and you add value on this communication. Be real and show that you care about them. Make them to trust you! And if you have great products and services, you are a winner! The drawback of this is that many companies (your competitors too) try to do the same and you have to be creative, unique and fast! There are several examples of winners and losers on the game of community building!

Zappos is a clear winner! It is the company that uses Social Media better than everybody else. The culture of Zappos is ‘communicate with the customer and do it well’! Zappos encourages its employees to create Twitter account and tweet! Until now 438 employees use Twitter. There is the ‘What employees are doing right now’ page that shows all the tweets of employees. There is a ‘start’ page that the CEO of Zappos explains to his employees what is Twitter about and how you create an account. Is this amazing? YES! Twitter is a great way to communicate with people and Zappos knows this. For Zappos is not only Twitter. They have 13 blogs, Facebook accounts, YouTube channel and many more. You cannot do anything more than ‘Love Zappos!‘

Dell is another winner. They try to segment the market and create multiple accounts for Twitter and Facebook. Dell has a very organized Community page. They try to communicate with people in as many places as they can. (Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn etc.) Strong brands need strong communities and Dell knows that very well.

Let’s find a loser. Sony can be one of them. Do you see Sony around? No. Sony made many mistakes and some of them are about communications. Sony has a community page but they are not successful because as I mentioned before they were not creative, fast (just started – beta version) and unique. Sony has few Twitter followers, few Facebook fans and unfortunately this is SONY! I am most of my everyday life online and I rarely hear something about Sony. It is their mistake and they have to fix it. (Along with all the other mistakes)

This picture doesn’t mean a lot (Twitter is not the only measurement). I just want to compare the accounts.

What about Apple? Apple is a unique company. It is the company that uses NO Social Media and has one of the strongest and fanatic communities. How? Through their fans. Apple doesn’t have to do anything for this. Apple fans create the Social Media buzz and this is phenomenon. No Twitter, blogs, Facebook, and Videos are owned by Apple.. It is crazy that everybody talks about them without doing anything. Of course Apple has its own way to build its community but this way is unique.

Successful brands build strong communities, offer great products and services and they win!

Today I attended the launch of the Seesmic Desktop. Seesmic owns the very famous Twitter client Twhirl (1.2 M downloads until today) that is in the top list of  clients with Tweetdeck. Loic Le Meur, the founder of Seesmic presented today, at Seesmic’s offices in San Francisco, the new Seesmic project that will (soon) combine Facebook and Twitter in one client. The event was also live via the Ustream channel of loic with an average of 500 users.

The new Seesmic desktop is a preview and can be downloaded only by the Seesmic team members. You can join the team and download the new Twitter client. There are several new features but the most interesting is the UserLists where you can make lists of your friends and have a separate column for each list. The whole design reminds me iTunes. Simple, with a left sidebar and other ‘Mac design ideas’.

Twhirl has some cons that Seesmic wants to get rid of them.. There is not a twhirl.com domain and its name is quite hard to say it. Seesmic wants also to strength its brand name by creating the Seesmic Facebook application and the new Seesmic Desktop.

So, join the team, test it and give your feedback to Loic and his friends!

Look the pictures of the event…