There has been a lot of buzz about Twitter’s new promoted tweets campaign. A podcast I listened in on really shed some light on the new approach to raising revenue.

Twitter has implemented a paid advertising, earned placement model. What the heck does this mean you ask. Well, it is shockingly similar to Yelp’s tactic of allowing advertisers (for Yelp, businesses) to place their relevant location at the top of a search result. Twitter calls this feature “Resonance.” A company will sponsor a tweet, based on the level of resonance (hashtag popularity, retweeting, etc) that tweet has received thus far, and that tweet will be elevated to the top of relevant search terms. The concern that Twitter should have is that Yelp was hit with incredible scrutiny for biased responses being placed at the top.

So what does this mean from the company side. Jennifer Leggio of ZDNet, commented that the new model is a “combination of both paid advertising and earned  placement. Companies are going to have to have skills in social media and not just in advertising placement in order to get eyeballs.”  This is true. Companies and ad agencies that represent them cannot continue to apply old media tactics to new social media channels. This has been surprisingly hard for companies to wrap their head around (I’ll save this for a later post).

Currently you will only find these promoted tweets when you do a search, and only for the terms that have been chosen to be sponsored. So, as of right now you shouldn’t expect to have your feed flooded with biased tweets. Yet, what if you suddenly did. How would you feel? Expect it to be expanded to other parts of the site if it proves profitable enough to Twitter.

Christina Kerley expressed concern regarding Twitter’s discussion of a phase 2. She stated that the organic model in place now makes sense and is consumer friendly, but concern arises when it shifts from “ok, we’re dipping our toe in the water and we have a revenue model to we’re polluting the entire stream” (great pun by the way).

Despite all of this discussion, Dick Constolo, COO at Twitter, stated, “Promoted tweets are not ads. You can do everything you can do to a normal tweet to a promoted tweet.” However, we still refer to the whole model as a form of advertising on Twitter. I think Twitter has a lot to overcome in order to gain consumer comfort with this new model. They do have one thing going for them though: The sponsored tweets you see are only regarding topics that you want to see, meaning that if you had just searched for a term, the top result in the stream will be sponsored. But for good reason because others have found it worth re-tweeting or adding a hashtag to.

Definitely more to come.