Paid media encroaches into social media space via Promoted Tweets (PT)

You may know that Twitter is experimenting with paid advertisement. One of its program is called Promoted Tweet ! A clear indication that paid media is encroaching into earned media space.

Most social media mavens and users like to emphasize the importance of earned media (compared to paid media). But one does not need to look beyond one’s twitter search screens to see how paid media is slowly and surely infiltrating into the realm of social media. See an example of promoted tweet on the right.

Yesterday, for the first time I noticed how one particular promoted tweet was on top an active search hashtag (#FOM10). I am not sure what measures other than impressions (& # of mentions, RTs etc) folks at @mangoosemetcis are tracking for their own “promoted tweet.”

For all social media watchers, Promoted Tweets program by Twitter is worth following, no pun intended here ! To find out more about the program go here.

My perspective: I think we will a lot more encroachment by paid advertisers into the earned media space. As long as Twitter and its partners can maintain a low noise level for its users from paid advertisers most users, like me, will not mind it. Personally I am very interested to see how Twitter can tweak their ad. display relevancy model to make these PTs relevant enough to the search result. Greater relevancy is definitely going to drive RTs and more actions with PTs.

Epilogue:

After I writing this post, I noticed another interesting post on PTs here

- Spotted: Inline Advertising in TweetDeck Search Columns

New Google Search feature: Results from people in your social circle

While using my wife’s computer today and Googling I noticed interesting results at the bottom of the first page with a title – Results from people in your social circle for supply chain management (See attached image). This is definitly a beta feature as indicated by the label.

I think this is a really cool feature which combines keyword and social media relevancy to drive the significance of a search result. Have you noticed this feature before? And what do you think about this new feature?

Role of social media in building trust

Paul Dunay wrote an interesting post on the role of social media to build trust in business using results from recently published Edelman Trust Barometer 2010.

60% of people in the age of 25-64 said they need to hear a message 3-5 times from a company before they can trust it.

Paul wrote:

“Social Media can actually help accelerate this stat for you because of the viral effect. “

I agree with Paul that social media can accelerate this, especially if a company’s social media message gets picked up and echoed by analysts and business press (see how that can happen).

You ask why? Well this is because the same report (no big surprise here) notes that that people don’t perceive all media to be equally credible. In fact according to this Edelman report, people trust analyst and business magazines as the most credible source of information about a company (see the Figure 7, above).

For those interested in another story on building trust with social media, read

• The Science of Building Trust with Social Media
• Twitter Southwest and (Good) customer service