Federated Media is engaged in an ad-supported partnership with Twitter in which the agency is pulling together tweet pages about specific topics being discussed on the Twitter platform. Twitter and Federated are sharing revenue from the projects.
For example, AT&T's sponsored site, MarchTweetness, was unveiled last week, complete with tweets about March Madness, writes MediaPost.
Another such program, ExecTweets, is a collection of tweets from Microsoft executives.
Matthew DiPietro, Federated Media's marketing manager, says the programs are fast-growing, and that there are many of them in development. And, while experimental campaigns of this type don't offer a direct return on investment beyond the amount of traffic that may be pushed to the sites, DiPietro says companies like AT&T hope that consumers will recognize the company's willingness to experiment with ways of adding new dimensions to the games that didn't exist before.
But in terms of some programs, such as ExecTweets, Wired News points out the fly in the ointment: Twitter has not implemented any official verification process to ensure that the tweets being written are really those of the execs they are purported to be from. DiPietro acknowledges that there's potentially a problem, though he denies it will be an issue for the ExecTweets program. "I can’t imagine it would be the case in this situation simply because it’s such a small group of people that were basically vetted just by watching their content," he says.
Last week, the New York Times wrote that many of the celebrities who have Twitter feeds don't actually write the tweets themselves.
Despite such potential problems, Forrester senior analyst Jeremiah Owyang says he expects Federated to reuse the concept behind the Microsoft and AT&T campaigns with as many other clients as possible.
The sponsored programs are part of Twitter's fledgling foray into ways to generate revenue, the lack of which analysts have been decrying for months.
Twitter is also further solidifying plans to implement a premium account structure with paid services as add-ons to the basic service.
