Twitter and the death of interruption marketing
March 18th, 2008 by Allen Voivod“How does Twitter make money?”
This is what Lani asked aloud the other day, and for now the answer seems to be, “With venture capital funding.” So on a lark, we Googled “Twitter business model” and found this post from Allen Stern wondering the same thing, but a few months earlier. I can’t seem to find his answer, but I did find a different post from Jason Calacanis, with 3 ways Twitter could become a billion-dollar business.
(Good grief! Riding a 140-character microblogging engine to a billion dollars? Maybe Twitter’s worth paying attention to after all.)
That said, I noticed two of Calacanis’ three options were based in the old school “Interruption Marketing” world. If you’re not familiar with the term, here it is, contrasted with “Permission Marketing,” from the Wikipedia entry on Seth Godin:
Advertisements on TV and Radio are classified as ‘interruption marketing’, which interrupt the customer while he is doing something of his preference. Thus he introduced the concept of ‘permission marketing’ where the business provides something of value to the customer and thus obtains his permission and then does marketing.
And since Seth Godin wrote the book on Permission Marketing, he oughta know!
With that said, if you were reading the “tweets” of the people you follow, and were suddenly presented with an ad every so often, that looked just like a regular tweet, would you be happy about that? Or annoyed?
That’s the scenario in two of the three business models Calacanis proposed. Granted, I didn’t start a blog empire and sell it to AOL like he did, so maybe I’m not the best guy to ask, but it seems to me that Interruption Marketing just isn’t right for Web 2.0 places like Twitter.
Though I was late to the discussion (his initial post was back in January), I added comment #37 to Calacanis’ post with some other potential money-making, non-interruption-marketing-based ideas. That’s just one of the many great things about blogging - no matter when the conversation started, you can join in.
And I’m just a guy sitting at the kitchen table, with his socks still wet from having stepped through a snowbank to give his wife her laptop, as she was heading out the door to drop our son’s play pal back at his house, on the way to a MicroCredit-NH peer group meeting. (Whew! That’s a mouthful if you read it aloud.)
But I’m also a guy with a half-decent opinion, which is now sitting out on the blog of a heavy-hitting, influential guy who’s being read by a lot of other very interesting folks. Which is pretty cool.
I guess there will always be a place for interruption marketing - it still gets a response, and even if it’s much, much less than it was, if it can be quantifed, it can be sold. But I think when we look back, we’ll see that Permission Marketing may have knocked Interruption Marketing for a loop, but Web 2.0 put it down for the count as we know it.
