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Yesterday, Twitter made an announcement that they would be unveiling a new contributors feature to the service on their blog. While Anamitra from the product team touted this as a way for businesses more accessibility with more personalities or users being tied to an account with transparency of authorship, this announcement also caused a few raised eyebrows and collective gasps at many a computer at the desks of social media guys in businesses across the country.
On the surface, the feature add-on should be a great addition to businesses looking to bring more individual personality to their brand. It also won’t have the company having to resort to ^JE after the Tweet and using up extra characters and it brings another level of trust to the conversation. As a practitioner for a brand, I see this as a great step in the right direction towards a comprehensive conversation tool, however I can also look at this as a realist – they also stated that this is the first of many changes for business.
So while these changes are coming the first downside that comes to mind is that these features will need to be worked into the third party tools that are used to monitor the space which takes time. Twitter itself is too messy to be able to pull the monitoring into its interface, as there is no way to ultimately segment mentions cleanly. So while this is a cool addition, I would like to see how it ties into the rest of the business suite.
This addition also raises a few more additional questions that will need to be answered. Perhaps the most obvious is what other features will @Biz and Co. roll into the business line? Will they partner with a company like TweetDeck or develop their own and add-in some analytics?
These will all be answered in a short time by the company as soon as they determine their own question of How much?
Twitter has constantly been criticized for lacking a true business plan and giving away the market for free. But in fact, they have built a platform that businesses of all sizes cannot ignore. The conversation is happening with or without them and businesses are clamoring for a one-stop solution that offers search, a concise dashboard and analytics.
The market has currently been set by CoTweet who recently began piloting their enterprise level service. I am still
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looking through the presentation (sorry Jesse) and hoping to test before seeing if the investment is something that can fit into our budget. With that said the ball is ultimately in Twitter’s court. Will they charge more (making more business for the guys at CoTweet) or will they look to undercut the competition?
Only time will tell, but today’s announcement is definitely the first crack in the bridge to free conversation that we’ve been embracing. The question now becomes how much companies are willing to invest in the conversation and their reputation management.
What do you think companies would be willing to pay to access Twitter? Scratch that, how much for their participation in the social conversation?