Twitter's first step at monetization of social networks

Monetization happens to be a tag in my blogs because of the simple reason that i have written a lot about "How to monetize social networks?" in ample.

Twitter's first attempt to monetize its huge and unique base of tweets is an interesting one in terms of the effort being a coordinated one between itself, Microsoft and Federated Media. Essentially the idea is to collate the tweets of business executives and other insightfull and business related tweets for interested people to follow. In essence it is following the top business executives on Twitter. It is called Exectweets.com . The website is essentially a collection of tweets from top business heads on Twitter like Virgin’s Richard Branson, eBay’s Pierre Omidyar, Digg’s Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose, Twitter’s own Evan William and yes, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg amongst a whole others.

The partners are fairly interesting in the terms of background competencies. While Twitter, champions conversational media, Federated Media is versatile in the conversational mode of advertising and Microsoft is one of the largest users of online advertising. Thus the Twitter promoted website exectweets.com may be an online branding/advertising solution for Microsoft. The neat part is that Microsoft is able to address its cream audience: the business executives through this venture. Twitter would in the back end have a revenue arrangement with Microsoft, though the details are missing at this point of time.

Business heads who want to get into exectweets.com, as a branding opportunity, need to follow@exectweets and the team at exectweets would decide whether to add the twitter stream to their website or not.

Thus this is a convergence of social media vehicle with a very precise audience and a large marketeer. One interesting alliance and effort to follow up.