Will Twitter Finally Stop Being An #Advertisingfail?

Twitter made changes to its Terms of Service (ToS) this week, adding a clause on advertising. Cofounder Biz Stone wrote in a blog post Thursday that Twitter plans to “leave the door open for advertising,” but has no immediate plans to announce an ad model.

It’s about time. Until now churning profits from Twitter has been the brainchild of third-party developers and companies tying advertising or marketing services to the site. And while the legalese makes it unclear as to what it all means, industry experts pick it apart in a way similar how they might scrutinize a long-tail keyword search engine optimization (SEO) or pay-per-click (PPC) marketing campaign.

Twitter’s ToS doesn’t spell out the type of advertising it plans to offer, but could include any type, even those as basic as a home page ad. It also could tie anyone’s public status updates to a PPC ad.

Cutbacks Force Greater Marketing Accountability, Collaboration

Widespread budget cuts in 2009 and demands from top management to do more with less have forced corporate marketers to step up their accountability/measurement efforts and improve collaboration with other organizational departments, according to a recent survey from Marketing Management Analytics (MMA) and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA).

The study also found that cost-saving measures are causing marketers to shift campaigns away from traditional media toward digital formats, away from brand-building activities toward promotional tactics, and into lower-cost media in general.

Free Shipping Email Offers Spike Conversions

According to a new survey from Experian CheetahMail, “Free Shipping report: Benchmark data and analysis for email marketers,” reported by Internet Retailer, 70% of respondents from online companies offering business and consumer products and services, catalogers, and multichannel retailers had higher conversion rates on e-mails offering free shipping than on other types of marketing e-mails. Of the 70% with higher conversions, 78% saw increased transaction-to-click-rates, and 47% had higher average order values in free shipping e-mails compared to other marketing e-mails.

Transaction-to-click rates for free shipping e-mails in the consumer products and services industry were 60.7% greater on average compared to other marketing e-mail messages, and more multichannel retailers used free shipping promotions in the first quarter of this year compared to Q1 of 2008-up from 47% to 55%.