I am giving a presentation today at O’Reilly Twitter Bootcamp in New York. Below is a copy of my presentation on Sponsored Tweets if anyone couldn’t attend or wants to share.
I have been traveling non-stop for the past couple months. Last week alone I was in San Francisco, Chicago and Boston. Tomorrow morning I will be up at 3am for a flight to New York. Despite all my travel I would not consider myself loyal to any particular airline. I use Orbitz to book all my flights and generally go with the best price regardless of the airline… but that may soon change.
AirTran has outfitted a good number of their planes with Wifi. You can connect to the Internet in flight for $9.95. Not only is it reasonably priced, it’s fast! So fast that I was able to have a video conference at 30,000 feet. I took three flights on WiFi enabled AirTran planes last week and averaged about 2Mbps for downloads. I love that I can be connected with my team back at IZEA while in the air.
This was a great move for AirTran. Not only is it an additional revenue stream, it has converted me to a loyal customer.
I thought I would make a quick point about sponsored tweets given all the discussion going on. Direct and indirect monetization of Twitter is nothing new.
My buddy Mike over at TechCrunch has been doing sponsored tweets for some time. I think TechCrunch actually helped pioneer sponsored tweets.
The only difference is that TC is pointing you back to a sponsored blog post, which also happens to be surrounded by tons of ads that advertisers pay for on a CPM basis. The more people that click on the link above the more money TC makes.
Not only is TC getting paid for the tweet, they are getting paid for the post and the display ads. In fact, every tweet that drives people back to TechCrunch.com is monetized. If that isn’t a sponsored tweet I don’t know what is. I commend TechCrunch. It is a smart business move for them to integrate all of their social media assets into their advertiser offering.
What we are doing is cutting out the middle step. Instead of pointing someone to a blog post, that then points them to a sponsor we are simply pointing to the sponsor.
Either way it is sponsored, our method just generates better results for the advertiser because it is directly sponsored. It’s more efficient, you don’t lose anyone in the pass through.
I had a discussion with Brian Morrissey of AdWeek yesterday about the upcoming launch of Sponsored Tweets. To be honest I didn’t expect a story to be published just a few hours later. The site is still in development and not available to the public. I didn’t share very much about the service and had nothing visually to show him in terms of how it would work. However, the blogosphere is abuzz this morning with many sites echoing the same story. You can check out some coverage here:
Do we plan on launching a solution that allows people to monetize their twitter influence? Yes. Are we trying to do so in a way that provides disclosure, autheticity, freedom of voice, ROI for advertisers and some level of moderation? Yes. It’s not an easy thing to do, but we have been playing around with Twitter publisher monetization models for some time now. The goal is to best serve tweeters, advertisers and readers.
I have always been open to discussion on any topic. There is more than one way to approach this and I am all ears. If anyone wants to do an interview, podcast or just talk shop drop me a line at ted@izea.com and we will schedule something soon.
Most people think of Apple’s Keynote as a PowerPoint replacement for making presentations. While it does kick the crap of PowerPoint as presentation software it also doubles as great video creation software. You may remember the sponsored conversation video I posted a few weeks ago. Guess what? The entire thing was put together in Keynote. The assets were created in Photoshop and Illustrator then composed and animated in Keynote (in HD no less).
The built-in text and image transitions in Keynote make it a breeze to put together great looking videos. I hired Chris Davies at ProVoiceUSA.com for $125.00 (a hell of a deal) to do a professional vocieover for the presentation, then exported it as HD video using the share feature. If you need to produce educational videos fast and on the cheap you might want to check out Keynote and give Chris a call.
If you follow me on Twitter you may have noticed the #tedstreasure hashtag on a number of posts. I am using this hashtag to identify tweets that are part of my Ted’s Treasure promotion. What is Ted’s Treasure? It’s pretty simple actually. As I travel the country I am randomly leaving a trail of prizes in my wake. I take a picture of the treasure, drop a pin on Google Maps and tweet out the hints. Whoever finds my treasure first gets to keep it. So far I have dropped cash and prizes from Pancheros and X-Shot.
If you have something of value that you would like to provide as a treasure please let me know and we can chat about it. I am not charging anything to participate, I do it because I like giving people free stuff. Here are a few picture from recent winners:
@ElizabethB won a free burrito from Pancheros
@Brittanylady won a brand new X-Shot
McDonalds product placement on the news desk
I am working on a big presentation about product placement and I need some help. I want to gather the biggest body of examples I can get my hands on. I am specifically looking for television and movies, but I would love to get some other examples as well (video games, theme park attractions, fast food). Anything where advertising is integrated into the content or experience is of interest. If you have your movies or television shows digitized I would love to get my hands on full quality stills (640px or greater) of the following:
- Taco Bell in Demolition Man
- Apple Computer in Mission:Impossible
- Dodge in Twister
- FedEx in Cast Away
- Subway in Happy Gilmore
- Pepsi in Back to the Future
- Coke in Blade Runner
- McDonalds in the Fifth Element
- Coke in American Idol
- Ford in American Idol
- Staples in The Office
- Ford in Knight Rider
- Mr. Potato Head in Toy Story
- Red Strip in The Firm
- Crest Vanilla Toothpaste in The Apprentice
- Lark Cigarettes in James Bond License to Kill
- Audi in iRobot
- Gap in Minority Report
- Blackberry in Sex in the City
- Snapple in Seinfeld
I will do a follow up post on this an provide links back to everyone who helps on the project. Please point me to your stills in the comments.
Actually it was more like 3 since we spent two full days traveling. Next time Tara and I take a trip there we must allow more time.
Costa Rica from Ted Murphy on Vimeo.
This Easter weekend Tara and I took our first trip to Costa Rica. I am on a plane right now returning to the U.S. tired, soar, sunburned and very happy. I have been fortunate enough to travel to quite a few places in my life, but none of them were like Costa Rica. We experience a lot in a few short days. I am going to break up the trip into a series of posts so you don’t fall asleep.
Day One
We began our journey with a short 3 hour flight from Orlando to San Jose on Jet Blue. The second we hit the ground it was clear we were no longer in the U.S. The first thing we did was rent a car. The rental car employee explained to us that it was common for locals to booby trap the roads by throwing nails and glass in the path of unsuspecting tourists. “Booby traps,” I thought to myself. “I wanted to go to a tropical paradise, not a war zone.”
He instructed us to check the tires on our vehicle before we left the rental facility and make sure that the car jack was in good working order. The employee then rattled off a list of emergency instructions and phone numbers, smiled and said “have fun.”
When we arrived at the car rental pick up building it was clear to me that the employee was not kidding. Every vehicle in the facility lacked hub caps and were outfitted with inexpensive, almost disposable tires. All the buildings in the area were fortified with tall fences, razor wire and bars on their windows. It made me a bit nervous but Tara and I piled into our little SUV, punched our hotel into the GPS and set off on a tour of the Costa Rican country side.
While the scenery was beautiful I dreaded every second of our drive from San Jose. We encountered traffic, cows, washed out roads, clouds and many one-way bridges. While all of these were genuine hazards the biggest hazard of all was the people. There were people standing and walking on the highway at every turn. I didn’t understand what was going on. Are these people going to throw glass in the road? Are they going to jump out in front of my car? Is this a booby trap? Are they going to try and rob me? I was incredibly tense.
Five hours later we arrived at outside our hotel La Mansion in Nuevo Arenal. Tara and I were both exhausted. My hands hurt from gripping the steering wheel so hard, my shirt was soaked with sweat. Yeahhh! We are here. We didn’t die!
La Mansion is a small hotel on Arenal’s north shore that features 17 small cottages. We walked into the lobby/restaurant/bar and were greeted by the owner’s daughter Peggy and their dog April. Peggy explained to me that her father Leo built the hotel 17 years ago. She and her father manage day to day operations and her daughter cooks breakfast and dinner. Tara and I enjoyed a glass of wine and later noshed on homemade beef goulash and broiled sea bass.
We called it a night around 8:30 Costa Rica time and crashed out in our private villa. Day one was filled with travel and stress… but all that changed the next morning… : )
There are somethings that I am good at. Riding a horse while trying to make a video is not one of them.