Amid rumours that Twitter and Amazon are in talks about a potential acquisition, it seems that Twitter are considering how to charge people to use their services.

But surely there is some mistake in this piece over on Brand Republic, who quote SalesForce.com’s charging structure at $995 per month?

Maybe not: the idea is quite an interesting one. You are basically asking Twitter to scour tweets for customer comments about your company – allowing you to then respond directly (and publicly) to people who are complaining, complementing or looking for info about your business.

This reminds me a lot of the things that Jeff Jarvis talks about in his excellent book “What Would Google Do?”. He describes the fall-out from his ‘Dell Sucks’ post(s) a few years back – and the whole question around whether companies should be monitoring the buzz around their brands from blogs. (answer: yes). And lambasting the response that said: “We look but we don’t touch” given by Dell when they were asked about their approach to consumer comments on blogs.

In other words, I (for one) thoroughly welcome this idea. Who knows, maybe customer service will improve generally if companies start listening to their customers?

(I know, radical thought, isn’t it?)

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the price of success

I’ve been twittering on and off for a while now – trying to figure out how it fits in with all my other activities – and gradually finding it more and more interesting over time. Already this year, the buzz around the microblogging service has kicked up several gears: Stephen Fry’s often witty stream-of-consciousness has been a highlight, but I’ve been gradually seeing more and more of my friends and business contacts using it.

Links back and forth with blogs (alerting to updates), Facebook, various IM and LinkedIn status messages seem to have potential.

One of my LinkedIn connections has been using his status to advise media sales people when he is in ‘buy’ mode – I’m curious to learn how this will impact the quality of his media buys.

Twitter has also gained considerably attention in mainstream media this month: suddenly DJs on Radio 1 are talking about it incessantly.

So perhaps it is unsurprising that  @gordonm‘s tweet yesterday about Twitters desire to monetise their service by charging businesses for using the service in a commercial fashion was essentially a link back to the Brand Republic site.

I don’t know how many followers @gordonm has at the moment, but the suggestion of how effective this can be found in @stephenfry’s history, where his mere mention of a site can bring their servers to a standstill. Mr Fry has over 150,000 followers today.

So how long before Twitter becomes part of the marketing landscape? And how will they develop sufficient revenues so that they can improve their up-time (Twitter.com is down as I write this)?

One interesting example: on Monday my flight from Heathrow was delayed by 2 hours. I tweeted “Desperate rush to h’row this morning was futile: flight delayed 2 hrs +. Grrr.”  This from my iPhone.

Almost at once I had a response from Boarding! inviting me to post details of airport to them to meet up with other stranded travellers.

It’s going to be an interesting one to watch: can Twitter do what other social networks are struggling to do and crack the social networking revenue stream conundrum? My guess is there’s a way to make it work via mobile perhaps. AFullerView evidently has some ideas as well.

Anyone else?

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Yesterday's news...

Sandlines is eagerly awaiting Friday’s delivery from Ocado at home. It’s coming late in the day – around 8pm. I know, I know, but I have a 3 year old, so Friday nights are different to how they once were… and that’s not a complaint btw…

Anyway, I just read over at Brand Republic that Ocado and The Times have agreed to distribute copies of the paper to people getting a delivery. Nice touch. The Times is losing readers – and in credit crunch times, Ocado customers are presumably questioning the value of their weekly order (I know I’m down to about once a month now…)

So at 8pm, do I get that morning’s paper? If that’s the outcome, then someone, somewhere has really failed to think this through. What am I going to do with Friday’s paper at 8pm? If only the laws hadn’t changed, I could have used it to wrap up some fish and chips …

Or maybe wrap up the salad they’ve supplied that is also out of date the next morning.

I feel I should be more demanding!

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