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http://venturebeat.com/2008/12/15/twitter-has-made-dell-1-million-in-revenue/ -
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You post a url like http://venturebeat.com/2008/12/15/twitter-pulls... in your twitter update
Twitter transforms this into http://tinytwt.com/a23d4f1 which drives a drive through or popup to Amazon with a shared Amazon Associates that kicks back 10% or 100% to the user (paid Twitter users get 100%) as an optional opt-in feature.... and of course delivers the link you really want in the new browser window experience in the pane below.
Quick, someone do this and make a bazillion Amazon dollars!
(hey, if about.com can do it...)
Twitter is still a communication channel that reaches a small, growing and vibrant audience of early adapters. But as you said, it lacks size and as someone else once said, size does matter.
someone clicks from one site to another, the prior page URL is passed
to the destination site. So, Dell knows how many people came to their
site from Twitter or any other site. Most sites also know how many of
those visitors end up buying.
I certainly wouldn't hold that up as a Twitter success or necessarily an indication of what a smaller company could do.
I like Jay's idea.
For many of us Twitter is a effective networking tool, which in turn drives net ranking, but I am sure we will see several other large scale Twitter campaigns in the near future and even more when they monetise the service next year.
http://www.privacy-center.be.tc
Exploring the leads
Don't forget how much money social media consultants make encouraging people to use Twitter... probably more than Dell as well.
But if the only people really making any money are the ones talking up a service, there is a problem.
Think about it. In terms of cost and exposure twitter has given Dell FREE social media access and brought in an additional $1M in revenue in a market which is very soft right now.
Just sending an email through the mass amounts of red tape in most industries has an internal cost of like $1,000 so getting your message out there for nothing is a huge bargain.
Start charging and goodbye fanbase.
http://yonkly.com
Feel free to embed.
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/11/25/v...
I'm a huge fan of Twitter and agree it's a potentially valuable application, but Dell's million in revenue really doesn't tell us much of anything about anything. First, that's a revenue number so we are talking relatively small profit here of perhaps 50k for Dell. Second, their social media department probably doesn't work for free. How much did Dell pay to gain this footprint at Twitter? How would that have compared to the same spend for PPC ads or offline media?
As much as I'd love to see social media - especially blogging and microblogging - thrive, let's not try to hype things so much this time around.
By this silly form of accounting you'd have to say email infrastructures like gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail are responsible for *trillions* in revenue because people communicated via email to do business.
The monetization framework is not the same as the communication framework as this article implies.
To truly put a figure on the impact will be difficult, but the efforts of the overall strategy has moved the unfavorable blog post far from the top of Google and has helped shape an improvement in the relationship between Dell, bloggers, and its customers. In addition to the $1M in direct measurable impact, you should factor in how many more people bought a Dell computer because they were not exposed to the very unfavorable blog post when they were doing research about their purchase.
Twitter, is a phenomenon that we are all still trying to understand. For me, after a little more than a year and a half using the service, I have begun to see it as an unfiltered snapshot into the “consumer consciousness”. Customers talk about products and brands that they love and hate to one another, not to survey’s or in structured focus groups. For the most part Twitter is real. Using this information to improve your company’s products, service and relationships to your customers is the true value of this tool. In my opinion,
Twitter should not be viewed as much as a service about “What are you doing”, but rather a service that tells us what others are thinking.
The money is not the issue at this stage. The fact that they actually did it, tracked it and proved the concept is. Watch what they do with this next!
In my mind (lowly SM tech sales person), the biggest challenge will be weeding through all the "junk" promotion that is about to hit all Twitter users.
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/business/business-model-...
Rona
onecoach.com
And I think Steve Dodd had the right idea, wait until the junk twits start hitting.
Get a free copy of Twitter power marketing http://www.squidoo.com/twitter-power-marketing
It is good to see Dell have moved onto Twitter and other social platforms and they are actually bringing in more people and sales to their site, but im not really too sure that it is very significant.
There are a number of other models, eg corporate accounts as already suggested could be focused at providing additional feature for companies like dell to promote to their followers. The same could be done for bloggers, getting different features added on at different costs to help promote their blogs.
Or maybe it is going to come down to the most useful option it would seem for twitter, is run a service that has no true model for making a profit and create a whole group of people like here all giving their opinion in as such, twitter has a massive amount of thought without having to pay their own people to think about.
http://www.twitter.com/yuvitube
to be the best so far.. .
Quite a week, indeed.-Health Care