The revenue stream for Twitter may have originated in last year's American election and the specialized site that Twitter created for it. Co-founder Biz Stone pointed to the election when he announced Twitter's [paid] support for a similar project named ExecTweets. Partnering with Federated Media and using Microsoft money the new project is an enhanced platform for following business leaders on Twitter. The blog All About Microsoft provided a rundown of ExecTweet's features including the filtering and threading options that many Twitter users have longed for (the same features that FM's John Batelle cited in his list of 'value adds' for ExecTweets).
Forrester's Jeremiah Owyang analyzed the concept of sponsored aggregation and outlined the expectations of all parties involved in this particular experiment. Many bloggers raised questions about those very expectations. Marketing Pilgrim pointed out that many users will never see Twitter's ads since they only use Twitter through 3rd party clients. The What's Next Blog blamed active shareholders and PR departments as reasons why ExecTweet's Tweets might not prove scintillating.
Federated Media obviously knows that there are many topics higher on the social pecking order than are the thoughts of CEOs. Today they announced a similar project named March Tweetness sponsored by AT&T that will cover the NCAA tournament.
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