Alister Cameron // Blogologist

This week I made a decision. A difficult decision that shouldn’t be. I made the decision to monetize my Twitter account.

This post explains my rationale and might have to do for now as a “disclaimer” of sorts. I’d appreciate your feedback, because my “journey” on Twitter may be instructive for your own purposes, but most of all because I want your help to do Twitter better.

Firstly a bit of background…

Earlier this year I decided to get serious about Twitter. As a “blogologist” I could teach you, coach you, brow-beat you and bore you senseless about blogging, but I was not the expert “microblogger”. It’s worth pointing out here that what I do for a living amounts to continually experimenting with the World Wide Web, figuring out what works and doesn’t work, and deriving out of my work/play some best practices (or at least sensible strategies and tactics) for my clients and readers.

Getting serious about Twitter meant a few things:

1. Bolting Twitter as comprehensively as possible into my usual “workflow”, so that it was easy for me to integrate tweeting into the stuff of my typical workday. So along came Twitterbar, Tweetdeck, Ping.FM and a few nifty apps on my iPhone.
2. Turning my (almost) daily newsreader review in Feedly into a “broadcast” of interesting links.
3. Learning the Twitter API and wrestling with PHP scripts to test the automation of this or that workflow.
4. Spending ridiculous amounts of time in front of Tweetdeck talking to real people, helping them, watching their tweeting habits, discovering “subcultures”, and so forth.
5. Messing with the Twitter API so that I can bring my followers an (almost) endless streams of Rodney Dangerfield jokes, interesting factoids or whatever else I find out there that I think is worth sharing — in an automated way so I don’t forget, and so that I keep up a constant level of activity on my account.
6. Obsessing over the question of how fast I could grow my Twitter following, and by what means. I have developed an approach to growing my Twitter account that works for me and has nothing to do with what spammers do (or more importantly, why), but I remain daily fearful that I will be misunderstood, and most days someone does misunderstand me. In fact, they’re misunderstanding Twitter itself, but that’s a blog post for another day.
7. Battling my conscience on a daily basis, looking at my children, and knowing that I can’t yet justify what I’m doing to my family on any sensible commercial terms. If Twitter were a hobby, it would be getting out of hand. If it’s part of what I do as a social media consultant — and of course, it is — then it needs to make sense in ROI terms.

And so to my decision to monetize my Twitter activities…

The first reason I have for monetizing it is about ROI. There are many ways I can measure the return on my Twitter efforts, and most have nothing to do with money. I really love it, for a start. It’s the most fun you can have if you’re a social animal and get a thrill out of connecting with fascinating people from all over the world (it makes every day a serendipitous occasion of one sort or another). But to ignore the need for a financial return is silly.

Now, with my blog, I clearly do receive a (very modest) financial return from it. Of course, most of what I earn is not directly derived from my blog (or blogging) and there are very few people out there for whom that is the case. I know very few people who make a lot of direct income from blogging, and the number is, if anything, dropping. Their formula involves loads of traffic leading to advertising, affiliate sale and product revenue streams. My blog is rather an also-ran in the particular niche it sits in, and hasn’t the “critical mass” of traffic to do more than give me an “income trickle”, rather than a stream.

The second reason I have for monetizing my Twitter account comes back to what I do: I play around with products, services and protocols online in order to test and prove to my clients, readers and others what works, doesn’t work and why. The question of monetizing Twitter is a huge one at the moment, and far be it from me not to go out there and try stuff. And… far be it from me not to do that with the account that matters the most to me: @alicam. Scary as that may be, if it should offend people.

So I’ve decided to go for it, despite my fears.

A Point of Order

Can I just make an important point of order, here. I’m preempting some complaints.

Twitter is a protocol, more than anything else. It’s not a website, although it has one. It’s not software, although most people use it by means of software. It’s a short messaging protocol for peer-to-peer online communications. There is not much more to say, and that’s why Twitter is so successful, to my mind: it’s really really simple and really really “open” for people to do with it as they please. Accordingly, I get upset when people tell me off for some aspect of how I use Twitter. I get equally upset when the guys at Twitter do the same. It seems we all have trouble getting it into our heads that the technology of a thing is not the same as the culture of a thing. Especially so with Twitter.

Culturally, people have become fond of describing Twitter as — and using it as a means of — friends doing online SMSs. The “rule” then follows that you should only follow people you already know. Conversely, then, following loads of people you don’t know is a contravention of said “rule” and that’s wrong. The fact that this is entirely a cultural thing, and has nothing to do with the technology, should be plain to all, and supported by the fact that this rule is nowhere written down.

Who told you Twitter was for connecting friends together only? Who told you it couldn’t equally well be used as an outbound marketing channel for businesses? Who told you to judge someone like me, with 90,000+ followers AND friends, and to deem me to have overstepped some line of propriety? I can explain exactly what I do on Twitter, how I do it and why I do it, but why must I do that? Why do I have to answer to a given set of “culturally-defined” norms?

Surely we all realize that Twitter will go the way of every other service, protocol and language on the Internet?? Perhaps you were not there, but I well recall the early-to-mid 1990s. I was there when you could get from one end of the Yahoo directory to the other in a day. I was there when the big innovation in websites was the “What’s New” page — perhaps the real precursor to the blog. And I was there towards the end of the 1990s when commercially-minded people — alleged raving mad capitalists — came and “defiled” the beautiful, innocent, pure culture of it all, with their dirty campaign emails, their banner ads and their long-form salesletters.

But tell me what you see today? As with all these things, you’ve seen them settle down into an orderly reality where common sense has prevailed and where we’ve accepted that good ideas cost money. Sure Firefox is free, but the guys who write it have jobs somewhere else. Sure Linux is free, but Linus worked for someone while he wrote it. Folks, there is a market economy behind everything you enjoy online, even if the spoils of that market are geniuses with free time who create cool things like HTML, Mozilla, XMPP, Apache and some key elements of almost the entire protocol stack that sits behind your daily experience of the Internet.

Likewise, the folks behind Twitter are struggling to move from “fairyland freeville” to a place where money doesn’t grow on trees. Behind everything online is a real business model, and if there isn’t someone will be eating canned dogfood soon enough.

Feeding off the Beast

Here’s a curious parenthesis to this: it might well be argued that Twitter has created a business opportunity for others (thanks to the Twitter API), better than it has for itself. There are perhaps hundreds of services out there which you can use your Twitter credentials to log into, which will then charge you a fee for some value-add service. This is the most wonderful thing, to my mind… the purest form of (beautiful) capitalism, and what we have previously seen with Google, MySpace, Facebook and the iPhone: a huge whale (excuse the pun) that gives life and sustenance to a gazillion tiny little suckerfish hanging off the side of it. All the big guys do it: build something massively valuable and — almost always — free to the consumer, create a comprehensive API and then invite “app developers” to get creative! And the fruit of this extraordinary model is up-and-coming new media millionaires “feeding off the Facebook/Google/MySpace/iPhone beast”, as it were. Gotta love capitalism.

Twitter MUST go down this path. Twitter is doing its best to do so. The key is the API, massive performance, massive scalability, massive reliability and — never forget — a revenue model for themselves.

Ok, I think that was an excursus on an excursus. Where was I going with this?!

My Value Exchange With You

The basis of any business is value. And here’s how I see it playing out for my hours spent working on Twitter: I will bust my butt to make my Twitter account valuable to my followers if my followers will tolerate the occasional sponsored tweet. That’s it. No more, no less.

I would like to think that my Twitter account is already valuable to my followers, so let me restate it: I will continue to tweet as I currently do (the same volume, humour, breaking news, personal touch, etc) and I will ask you to accept a tweet now and again that someone paid me to tweet; an advertisement, if you will.

When I tweet something that has been paid for by someone else (or from which I derive revenue) I will indicate it, most typically with the #ad hashtag. I will never tweet out anything that I wouldn’t personally be interested in or is “off-topic” for me or my followers. And sponsored tweets will be rare… I am fortunate to have a lot of (real) followers and I get to charge quite handsomely for the privilege of access to my “followership”. I don’t need to do much of it, but I do need to do it.

If you decide this approach of mine is wrong, then I will bid you a sad farewell and accept your “unfollow” with sadness, and conclude that like the laggards of 1995, you refuse to accept that everything has a price, and that I have to pay a price to do what I do on Twitter, as much as you should have to pay a very trivial one to enjoy my tweets in turn.

Your Turn

What do you think? Does something I say here upset you? How do you feel about sponsored tweets? Will you stop following me if you see a sponsored tweet from me now and again? Can I trust you to come on this journey with me, if I am transparent about how much I earn and how I do it? I want this to be a learning experience for all, but I know I need to be recompensed in some reasonable way for it.

Finally, I trust the great majority of my Twitter followers. They know me pretty well. They know I’m real, that I care and that I am not about to burn anyone. I worked hard to get where I am now, and I only want to strengthen it and “expand” the possibilities here.

Thanks for being a part of it!