Its a bird, Its a plane, Its a SuperTweet

Published by Robi | Filed under Brain Buster, Professional

As a mere mortal walking in the world of mental giants who can come up with new acronyms, revenue models and company names faster than a speeding locomotive, I wanted to shed some light on what I found to be an interesting take on yet another practical and potentially lucrative use of twitter.

First, take a gander at Robert Scoble’s “Twitter to turn on advertising “you will love” (here’s how: SuperTweet)” The comments alone are worth the price of admission.
Twitter’s COO, Dick Costolo, today, at the TechCrunch Real Time Crunchup (live video of the conference is live now on building43, there will be lots of news all day long from this event), told the audience that Twitter is, indeed, going to turn on an advertising model.

This is a huge shift in what Twitter is saying publicly.

But advertising isn’t something many people love. So, how will Twitter make advertising you love?

By building a SuperTweet!

How can they do that?

Well, yesterday, I talked with Likaholix co-founder Bindu Reddy about just that. You can watch our video we recorded about how Twitter could make new advertising, which I say is a piece of building a SuperTweet.

So, what is a SuperTweet?

Well, first, some rules for building new ads and features for Twitter that people will love.

1. You can’t mess with the Tweet. That’s sacrosanct. So, we’re stuck with the 140 character rules, along with the rules of @replies and hashtags and all that.
2. You may NOT introduce new ad models inside the Tweet. You may NOT put ads inside Tweets.
3. You may NOT introduce new ads that look like Tweets.

So, what is a SuperTweet?

It is a Tweet with a metadata payload.

Think about all the metadata that exist OUTSIDE of the Tweet. How about you mouse-over a Tweet to see a new slide-down UI that shows you all the metadata.

What kinds of metadata do we already have?

1. How many times has the tweet been retweeted.
2. Where was the Tweet produced (geolocation).
3. What’s the tag cloud associated with the Tweet (get that from list names).
4. What tool produced the Tweet?
5. What are associated Tweets?
6. What are tweets in reply to this tweet?

But what else could we automatically generate?

Well, let’s say I wrote a Tweet saying “I’m going to see 2012 tonight.”

Couldn’t we tag that Tweet with the word “movie?” Like you can tag a photo on Flickr? Absolutely!

Couldn’t we have a bot that sees that 2012 and movie came through the system and then link to the IMDB database for the movie 2012, like this? Couldn’t you link to Fandango for movie reviews and movie times for 2012, like this?

So, add that all onto the tile that slides underneath this new “SuperTweet.”

But what else?

If CocaCola wants to target movie goers, couldn’t they put an ad into this SuperTweet? Something like “Drink Coke at the movies, show this tweet at the movie theater and get $1 off off a Coke.”

NOW you are getting how advertising could be something you love!

How about a Tweet that talks about a book. Someone could write “Loved Trust Agents by Brogan.” That could link to Amazon so you could put it on your Kindle.

There is ton of things that Twitter could do here to bring ads that people love, thanks to a SuperTweet infrastructure, and yes, I will love it.

By the way, two companies already are showing me advertising I love: Foursquare, which shows me offers from businesses nearby where I check in, and Yelp, who also shows me offers from businesses nearby. These are HUGE value ads for both consumers and businesses and if Twitter ads this new kind of advertising to a SuperTweet they will make billions of dollars.

I’m actually happy that Twitter is getting off of its “no advertising” stance and thinking about SuperTweets.

How about you?

Second, watch the video below or read about a cool exemplification of this idea by Keith Teare and speedi.ly. The article was posted by Michael Arrington, Getting To The SuperTweet: Speedi.ly Classifies The Real Time Web.