Co-authored by Dion Hinchcliffe (@dhinchcliffe) and Caroline Dangson (@cdangson).

Back in April, Peter Kim and I encouraged advertisers to wait until more information was released about Twitter’s new ad platform before jumping on the Promoted Tweets bandwagon.  We advised brands to find success with regular tweets (the basics) before diving into Promoted Tweets – a new hybrid of paid and earned media.  Since that time we have observed how bleeding edge brands like Virgin America and Coca Cola have experienced off-the-charts social media engagement with Promoted Trends, a new advertising concept Twitter began testing back in June as an extension of the Promoted Tweets platform.  Promoted Trends are topics already trending on Twitter (meeting a minimum level of popularity) that advertising partners can link their Promoted Tweet to, which guarantees greater visibility and reach for brands.

The fast and fleeting stream of social micro-messages on Twitter adds complexity for advertisers and marketers.  Such a real-time advertising market is hard for traditional organizations to respond to effectively as well. Those businesses that are up to the challenge and are serious about adapting and up-leveling their processes can reap significant rewards. That’s because Twitter is now one of the largest and most engaged social ecosystems online today.

According to Twitter, 100 million tweets are now sent out each day.  It is much more difficult to tap into a dynamic signal on Twitter these days with so many people, organizations and businesses (160 million) on the platform competing for attention.  For this reason, we think Promoted Trends is a viable solution for brands seeking for their messages to stand out in the crowd. Early evidence bears this out as Frank Reed recently noted, with both Promoted Tweets and Trends doing well with big brands.  The new challenge is that the crowd, not the brand, determines which tweet is promoted.  And the Promoted Tweet must associate the brand with a topic already trending on the site. More interestingly, the dynamic and unpredictable nature of the medium means that high value advertising trends can occur which fewer advertisers will chase, creating opportunities for both value and opportunity.

Source: http://www.trendistic.com, September 23, 2010.

During the first two stages of the new ad platform rollout, Promoted Tweets are linked to site searching behaviors.  Twitter experiences dramatic spikes in searches related to popular real world events according to Dick Costolo, Twitter’s COO (update: now CEO) who briefed Dion Hinchcliffe and I during Web 2.0 in San Francisco 2010.  According to Costolo, ‘popular events’ include TV shows and sports games as Twitter emerges as a media consumption channel.  A recent study that examines how people tweet about TV validates the frequency of the behavior in addition to Twitter’s decision to include video within the user stream of the new interface.  A month after our briefing, Coca Cola became the first case study of extraordinary success in linking a Promoted Tweet with the WorldCup hashtag (#WC2010).  Other early brands leveraging Promoted Tweets containing popular keywords are boasting 50 to 300 percent lift in engagement.

During these early stages of Twitter’s new ad platform, Promoted Trends appears to be the low hanging fruit for advertisers and marketers seeking for their messages to resonate on Twitter.  Promoted Trends remains novel, so there is less risk of user fatigue and avoidance.  Plus, the Promoted Tweet is linked to a topic already starting to trend among users.  Knowing this, we were surprised no brands leveraged Promoted Trends when Justin Bieber hit the stage in a varsity jacket during the VMAs starting a spike in three trending topics – #justinbieber #VMAs and #varsity_jacket.  (We’re half joking about this.)

The Real Challenge: Adapting to a New Advertising Model

We suspect many advertisers and marketers aren’t ready for real-time advertising, lacking the organizational structure (people and technology) and processes to support ongoing listening for these kinds of ad hoc opportunities, rapid creation of content and campaign execution.  Promoted Trends presents a limited window of opportunity that only a few brands will capture at first.  This requires the ability to execute fast, willingness to take well-calculated risks (no long-term planning or testing), and skill for carefully and strategically listening to the Twittersphere.  That’s asking a lot for so many brands still working to master the basics of Twitter engagement.

For now, here are our five steps we recommend for social business organizations seeking to climb the real-time advertising maturity curve:

1. Prepare for trending social advertising opportunities. Analyze and define what advertising opportunities you are looking for. Develop a database of desired trends mapped to associated advertising, developed in advance whenever possible (which it won’t always be when unexpected yet important trends emerge in Twitter and elsewhere.) Allocating a cyclical budget for real-time ads will also be crucial yet difficult by their unpredictable nature. Create a decision making process to decide when to pull the trigger based on cost and anticipated ROI.
2. Establish a trend monitoring capability. Again, while Twitter will be the primary focus for many the same goes for any social networking platform, or social media monitoring/listening/analytics platform that can provide this information. Connect this stream of information to your real-time advertising decision making process.
3. Learn how to manage real-time campaigns. A lot of what you learned from monitoring traditional online advertising still applies and so will some of the tools. Where real-time is different is in the need for situational awareness so that underperforming real-time advertising collateral can be quickly detected and tweaked. So too with watching and capitalizing on the cross-over of the advertising into social media so that proactive steps can be made to trigger viral behavior and distribution. Finally, and probably most importantly, social media advertising at its best is about genuine engagement. Have staff ready to quickly onboard into your real-time advertising efforts to support engagement with customers as they ask questions and make statements in the social mediums that require response. It’s those that are engaging that need the two-way response to fully drive the desired end result in any social media campaign. This is even more true of the real-time advertising model.
4. Assess and triage the results. Creating a scoring model and collect post-trend event data and rate how the campaign performed both within the real-time advertising system as well as the cross-over into all other social media channels. Use this to quickly learn what works and what doesn’t, as well as its overall value to the organization.
5. Instilling change in the advertising/marketing process. The Internet develops powerful new capabilities faster than most organizations can readily absorb them. Advertisers and marketers will take several years at least to properly digest and incorporate real-time advertising models like Promoted Trends. In order to take the very first steps down this path means that change champions must clearly articulate both the whys and hows of real-time social media advertising. Create clear messages about how your organization needs to transform its thinking both strategically and operationally as it looks at taking on these new advertising opportunities. Articulating the expected value is also essential to establish the staff and budget you’ll need to support real-time advertising. We find that proactive change management greatly improves the pace of adaptation to new social business models in general. Instilling needed organizational change must and should be an integral part of your real-time social media advertising strategy.

Are you planning to explore real-time advertising like Promoted Trends? Why or why not?