Steph Stuff

I just wanted to write down some dumb ideas I have floating in my head right now that popped in there as I was looking up a Twitter profile for @theindependent to see if it was worth a follow back.

The account I was looking at was for a sort of upscale shopping center here in Nebraska. Kudos to them for getting on Twitter and the Indy will follow back. But then I started wondering if they were following the paper hoping for retweets of their sales or something. Then I wondered if that was something viable for us. Could we look into charging to retweet a big sales event for a local business? Would the local business – assuming they were on Twitter already and “got” it – be willing to have their local paper, which would hopefully have a large following (most likely larger than the local business’s), retweet them once in a while? Maybe as an upsell?

Or what if, since I tweet manually for the paper, if we had a selection of local businesses who gave us their sales events, lunch specials or whatever for a flat fee once a week, if I tweeted those once in a while. Would that piss off followers? If I made them personable and not like an in-your-face ad?

I know there’s a service or two that automates this process but I think it’s safe to say it’s not wildly popular. I have no numbers to back that up, I’m judging based solely on the fact that between my various accounts, I see thousands of tweets and have yet to see a stream with an automated ad system set up.

I’m wondering if using retweets, or making recommendations of events manually as I do for headlines and outlinking would be a better approach and help monetize it just a little?

Obviously it wouldn’t fly for many papers who don’t have big follower lists, but I wondered about the the big ones like the Chicago Trib or NY Times or Austin-Statesman.

Or what about a “Today’s Tweets Sponsored By…” thing? Name a business in the morning when you start and a few times throughout the day? I don’t think it could be something ad reps sell separately, but again, maybe like an upsell? Buy 2 banners, get one day of Twitter sponsorhip a week?

I know Twitter’s not well-known enough for this, at least in my market. It would be a tough sell but I remember when selling post-its and corner peels was a tough sell and the upsell thing seemed to help.

I don’t know. These were just floating round my head this morning.