Making use of Twitter at Glam, the Telegraph and Channel 4

Posted by Helena Deards on February 25, 2009 at 5:14 PM

With Twitter's seemingly unending popularity, there is an ensuing rush to discover ways to harness it for commercial ends. There is particular discussion over Twitter's lack of an obvious business plan, and much debate on how to make money from it. At the moment, Twitter contains no advertising or other moneymaking content despite its large user base - although the latest round of funding will be used for site development and the creation of revenue-generating products.

Entertainment website Glam seems to be one of the first companies to utilise the site to make a profit; they have set up gWire. They created a widget, placed it on their home page and asked users to share their thoughts on the Oscars as the ceremony progressed. They found a sponsor in Aveeno, a skin care company, and had the Aveeno logo scrolling under the widget throughout the ceremony. In order to ensure that the platform would be appealing to their sponsor, Glam editors regulated which Tweets appeared, who was allowed to Tweet and deleted anything inappropriate. Glam had already experimented with the process during New York Fashion Week, although they have said that gWire is not exclusive to Twitter and may be extended to incorporate other social media sites such as Facebook.

Using Twitter in a practical, although not profitable, sense are Channel 4 and the Telegraph. At Channel 4, use of Twitter has been on the up via both the official @channel4news feed and that of presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy, @krishgm. Today, however, was a first - Channel 4 set up an interview with an eyewitness Twittering from the scene of a Turkish airline crash in Amsterdam. Guru-Murthy later dismissed descriptions of this method of using Twitter as "twitizen journalism", saying that it is "just a new medium".

In the integrated newsroom at the Telegraph, Twitter application Twitterfall has been gracing the big screen for the past two weeks. The application allows users to stream updates on certain 'hashtags' or search topics. Editor Marcus Warren revealed that the projection of Twitterfall is "the same size as the projection of Telegraph.co.uk on the screens and given more space than Sky, BBC and CNN on the wall."

Source: EConsultancy, Journalism.co.uk