Concept Document: Tweet Fixing

What is Tweet Fixing?


Use of social media networking sites like Twitter to initiate a spontaneous word of mouth advertising platform for an underlying concept/ cause/product. As we know that everyday some topics trends like a wildfire on Twitter and people start discussing them to make spontaneous trends. We must have experienced our timelines trending on what opinion leaders have spoken all about. Needless to know how cricketers’ or #babyB goes trending in Indian timeline; but trending of an unknown girl wearing blue bra or Vivek Oberoi also trending with #babyB enumerates the power of people on Twitter. That power can be well channelized into some concept/ cause / product through a paid medium of Tweeples (People on Twitter) for promotion.

Such Tweeples will be referred as Secret Advertisers in the following part of this document and beyond as well.

How Tweet Fixing will work?

Such advertising campaign will be full-fledged projects. There will be a core committee of creative Twitter Consultants who will provide their consultancy for scripting how the topic has to be initiated on Twitter. A lifecycle of the campaign has to be designed covering introduction, growth, maturity and decline phase of the campaign. They will analyze and plan correct timing for launching the campaign. The designed campaign will be then executed by the Secret Advertisers strictly following the predetermined protocol(Protocol includes Plan B as well!). A moderator for secret advertisers will have a constant watch on the timeline to ensure correct execution of campaign, if they need to switch to plan B or to suspend the campaign if suddenly any real storm of topics like #babyB appears between people.

Below is the basic prototype of how timeline will function to start a successful campaign, you may find Philip Kotler also liking this prototype:-

Prototype

Secret Advertisers :- @ThePopularGirlonTwitter , @AnIntelligentBoy, @AnyTimeCritic, @ScriptedStalkers (1 to N), @popularGirl’sFemalefriend (1 to N) , @Moderator @Campaigncatalysts

Real People :- @RealStalkers @RealOpinionLeaders @followerCounters @EarlyFollowers, @laggards

Pre-requisites:- designed campaign has to have genuine public interest catching contents. Secret Advertisers should have good audience in timeline and they must be real people as well (if not, they should thoroughly behave like real people). They should be also talking about other topics before, during and after the campaign to maintain their level of authenticity.

Note:- Induction of Artificial Intelligence should be avoided in this early phase.

Timeline Skeleton

Topic Initiater -@ThePopularGirlonTwitter starts sharing her views related to campaign.

@scriptedStalker(s) and @popularGirl’sFemalefriend (s)starts interacting with her and carry forward the conversation.

@RealStalkers also join the conversation and starts spreading the campaign to the real unscripted conversations.

@AnytimeCritic intervenes with his scripted counter point of view on the campaign.

@AnIntellegentBoy comes up with solid scripted points in favor of the campaign

Identified @followercounters are followed and unknowingly involved into discussion by @thepopulargirl @Herfreind @scriptedstalkers and @campaigncatalysts

@realopinionleaders will jump in the conversation.

@earlyfollowers will follow them

Above is a complicated twitter cycle which has to be performed with intelligent combinations and strategies to pull out real conversations from people.

All above entities keep themselves involved into discussions. @Moderator is keeping eye on the timeline and will be interactively using Twitter APIs to statistically monitor the flow and direction of the campaign.

Secret advertisers will initiate and actively participate in the growth of the campaign. If the campaign is successful, the maturity stage (refer product life-cycle curve) of the campaign will not require secret advertisers to tweet more frequently on the topic. The Twitter engine will carry forward the conversation in the targeted region of campaign. This will be a testing time for @moderator to keep a watch on the timeline so that he can instruct secret advertisers on how and when to perform changes in their respective tweet frequencies for the campaign. In the decline phase @laggards will also join the conversation in the campaign followed by the kickoff of the new campaign.

Last but not the least; throughout the campaign @Moderator has the responsibility to ensure that the campaign is progressing in the positive direction.

Every entity (people) in the Twitter will have their own audience to reach. Tendency of people on Twitter is to be reached and be heard. The campaign will be using this open secret of Twitter. Although, introduction and growth phase of the campaign could be artificial or scripted. But, those who understand the soul of twitter will be convinced that maturity phase of the campaign will be the real spontaneous discussion on the campaign.

This spontaneity of the campaign will carried forward to other social networking platforms like Fakebook (read Facebook) and outside the internet world as well.



Is Tweet Fixing Ethical?

When the idea was in raw phase, I asked myself the same question and also floated this query in my timeline. The element of social responsibility in the proposal has to ensure concept/ cause / product should qualify to be genuine fundamentally. Power of twitter is so smart that a fake underlying campaign cannot move into a positive direction. Secret advertisers will only be introducing the campaign to the timeline. Gradually the discussion will grow spontaneous with real people being involved with the real feedbacks and opinions. Tweet fixing will help to let people follow a direction for what topic to discuss. In social media networking we cannot control what content is delivered by the target audience who is also a part of this mass communication.



Just some ‘Virtual Real and Ideal’ thoughts

copyright- Rajeev Srivastava

Comments

  1. Anonymous7:35 PM

    The idea is nice, and must say, planned right down to the tiniest detail! Though I have a sneaking feeling that some basic form of this is already underway on our existing social media sharing sites.

    Two things I wanted to share here. First, ethical advertising doesn't exist in its purest form, ever. Some amount of manipulation or coaxing is obvious, and some argue that its legitimate because the user ultimately goes and buys the stuff, or views a movie, on his or her own self. Frankly, this is an argument that can go on for generations.

    Second, the internet and the web was supposed to a medium of free thought, without any overseer as such. Even the addition of a 'seed' tweet or a hash-tag will spoil that freedom. Not that it'll be the first time the concept would have been corrupted, but that's one thing that troubles me about this idea.

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  2. Thanks for acknowledging tiniest details.

    I completely agree with your points and they have been in considerations while i wrote this blog. Refer underlined Genuine fundamentally. Sans of that the campaign will go bust and end up a noise which which nobody listened. Indeed, Tweet fixing will be a good approach for people to know/acknowledge such genuine topics/concepts which are known but less discussed. e.g HIV/AIDS or breast cancer awareness are genuine topics but less discussed among people.


    Afterall, marketing campaigns target opinion leaders for pushing the product and why not Twitter can be used as a media to catch opinion leaders' attention. And in a free market or web-space, Opinion leaders are always right.

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  3. An interesting idea of a marketing campaign on Twitter has been presented here.

    One can't say whether its ethical or not. Probably the people who start the topic or those who may throw the topic into the discussion may be fake. But then if real people find the discussion for the topic attractive, they do latch onto it. But in case if it doesn't interest any party, creating 'n' number of fake personalities or IDs doesn't make much sense. So there content is the king.

    Secondly its very important to make sure that the right people are listening to you. One can't just start throwing messages into the open atmosphere without being sure on whose listening and whose not. The right audience is really necessary.

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