If Twitter Ads are Evil, What’s Your Company Supposed to Do?

Have you ever fast-forwarded through a commercial?

Have you ever used an ad-blocker?

Have you ever changed the radio station because there was a commercial on?

We’ve all done at least one of these three things.

Now think about this.

What if you are at a coffeeshop, talking to one of your friends, and they suddenly, out of nowhere, started talking about how much better Microsoft Windows 7 is going to be?

And what if they went back to what they were saying, without telling you what that comment was about, then suddenly interrupted another stream of thought with an ad for a MacBook Pro?

You’d think they were nuts, right?

Now, have you ever been tempted to sponsor someone’s tweets to reach more people? Or to take sponsorship in your own twitter stream?

Pete Cashmore would tell you not to do it, and here are some additional words about why not – the folllowing is a quote from his recent post about Twitter Ads:

That’s the exact same outdated model of interruption-based advertising that we’ve been trying to block out with a TiVo or an internet ad blocker. We don’t want it. We’ll ignore it.

And he’s right. We often fast forward over commercials – sometimes we don’t even notice them. (Notice I said “sometimes”, that will be important later.) We even intentionally block them from being shown to us.

Given that buying your way into the stream could  further alienate you from your customer base– what are you supposed to do to engage in social media, what do you do in the new model to get and keep customers?

We’ll talk about that shortly. First, let’s look at what the old model was.

Content is created. It’s made popular, and then access to the people that have been viewing that content is then sold to advertisers. Those advertisers pay a certain amount of money and they get attention.

That model is dead, hence the early boom and bust of the banner ad. Banner ads still work to a certain degree, but not the way they did in the old version of the static web.

It was problematic model to begin with on the web because there are so many ways to block out the intrusion of advertising. And yes there people out there who are still making money doing this with AdSense and Clickbank ads and the rest.

But it’s the way that that advertising is integrated into their message, making it more popular rather than an interruption, using it with the content ,rather than making it completely un-targeted and a blatant interruption that jars a person out of their lowered shield of trust, that makes it acceptable.

Not necessarily respected, admired, or desired, mind you. But it is acceptable to have your content sponsored if you do it the right way. That’s not what I’m getting at.

Any way you look at it, intrusive advertising is dead.

Does that mean we should stop advertising? No.

Some advertising gets through and if it’s the right message, to the right audience, at the right time, conveyed the right way, it’ll get through. But content has to mimic, even actually BE content now, because that’s now how it’s received.

In the time the old model was born, advertising was often the only way your items could be discovered. They had to be inserted into content like radio shows, movies, billboards, newspapers, magazines, and television, because that’s how new items were discovered.

Now, you have direct access to the people you want to reach through content. That doesn’t mean advertising is dead, simply that it is evolving.

Not only should we not stop advertising- if you’re in trouble, the fastest way to get you back out is advertising. A joint venture may take as little as a one hour phone call to set up, but a Google ad can be live in 15 minutes. You’ve got to advertise on some level – and you should.

Sometimes, advertising is consumed as content, and that should be your final objective with advertising, which changes the way we make it, and how it is distributed. Create your ads to be mini-versions of content already being consumed.

In those circumstances, they will continue to be passed along through trust circles, and make a lot more money for you in the process.

I’ve loved an ad so much I tweeted a link to it. (Another thing to love about Twitter. All I had to do to find that tweet from July was Google my Twitter account for the Recession Aggression bag.)

Take a look at the Recession Aggression bag video below, then let’s see if you can answer the next question yourself.

Why did I tweet it?

Because it wasn’t just an ad to me.

It was funny.

It grabbed my attention.

It spoke about an issue I was interested in.

I thought it would be useful to others, at least as a smile, at best as a resource (see the link at the end of the video.)

How can we apply that information to our own businesses?

What you want now is first, a hyper targeted audience. It’s hyper targeted advertising to an audience that, really really really wants it and not only as a last choice.

Secondly and most importantly, what you primarily want is a vehicle by which you can get your message as content into the eyes of people would previously could only be reached by advertising.

The reason why you want to consume the content is because content is more pervasive than advertising,and it is far cheaper to successfully market content than it is to buy advertising in the mid to long term.

Remember the cycle above in the old model? Content is created, then it is made popular. You don’t have to work as hard to get content popular, and the price is lower. A popular website or other online media channel is much cheaper to create or advertise on than a popular TV show, and in many cases has a bigger audience.

Enter social media. Advertising on Facebook is in a way like advertising during your desired demographic’s favorite TV show. I can have my “ad” displayed to hundreds, even thousands of people. Now will all the people who see a Burger King commercial run right out and buy a burger? No.

But enough of them will be exposed to Burger King that this is where they’ll know it is a choice when they do want one.

To take it a step further, becoming the content on Facebook or Twitter or StumbleUpon or other social media sites is the wave of the future. Turn your ads into content and display them directly to the people you want to reach, people that want your message.

We already know where they are – they’re reading the news, doing a search, checking their email or on a social media site.

Social media can help you be visible in all four of those locations as content if you let it.

The big question is – And then what?

You get their eyeballs. How do you get them to stay long enough to listen, and want to come back badly enough to subscribe? And how do you up that desire enough to want them to buy.

You have to trade in social currencies to achieve that objective.

As Peter Cashmore has pointed out money’s not the only one. There’s attention. There’s trust.

This week, I’ll I’ll list the social currencies in a series that talks about why you must being trading in social currencies and how you can capitalize on each one of them.

Then we’ll have a wrap-up article that lists what they all are, with examples of resources, sites you can go to, and tools you can use, in order to get more information about how to capitalize on all of them without alienating your customer base.

In the meantime, understand this. You can’t ignore social media. And you can only game it once. A much more cost effective solution that are respective of your time, too. To get at them, you’ll have to learn about social media, and how to trade in the social economy’s various currencies.

Next time, we’ll talk about what social currency is, why your company needs it, and why it would be foolish to ignore it, or social media for that matter.