Jason Calacanis expands upon his offer to pay twitter to get his Mahalo account onto twitter’s suggested user page. It’s the distribution channel and potential click-thru traffic he’s looking for, and click-thrus to his site equals registered users and a lifetime relationship with Mahalo that can be monetized over time.
The top 20 slots on Twitter are actually worth–to some people–2-10x what I offered. If Southwest, Amazon, eBay or Zappos were to get their hands on one of these accounts, they could easily make one uber-compelling tweet a week. 50 tweets from Amazon with things like “Top 100 Science Fiction Movies of All Time–as rated by George Lucas” would garner a two to 10% CTR. A Zappos tweet with “Back to school: Buy two pairs of shoes get one free” would get a huge response on August 20th.
A JetBlue daily notice saying “The first 1,000 folks to respond to this alert get $25 off their next flight” would mean never having another empty seat.
The point is that Twitter has the ability to unleash a direct marketing business the likes of which the world has NEVER seen. I predict they will, and when they do, they will make the Twitter nay-sayers look like the donkeys they really are. (Note: you ever notice the folks who have the most to say about making money are the ones who’ve never made any? Exactly.)
Direct marketing by mail changed retail forever, as did the Web and email.
Twitter will take that to an entirely new level. Why? Because people *live* inside of Twitter like they have never lived inside of a product before. We have NBA stars twittering about their performance at half-time and a president who leveraged the service to get elected.
It doesn’t take a genius to understand that there is something disruptive going on here.
Wasn’t this the promise of SMS? A direct channel to which consumers could sign up and get notifications of local deals in their area?
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