Twitter has recently been taking major steps to beef up its advertising game, including keyword targeting and cookie-based targeting. But what about the next step: actually being able to sell goods directly from the platform?
Twitter has been working on that part of the equation since at least the middle of last year, and on Monday it made a big move in that direction by snagging Philippe Dauman Jr. away from Google to be its director of commerce partnerships. Dauman revealed the news in a tweet sent out on Monday.
Extremely excited to join the flock @Twitter as Director, Commerce Partnerships after 6.5incredible years @Google. https://t.co/umszsaBOeW
— Philippe Dauman Jr. (@pdauman) March 31, 2014
Dauman also updated his LinkedIn profile to reflect the change. His responsibility: "Enabling commerce on Twitter."
Prior to this position, Dauman had worked at Google since 2007, giving him plenty of experience in the commer space. He started out as a Strategic Partner DevelopmentAssociate for content partnerships, before becoming a Strategic Partner Development Manager. He then moved over to the mobile commerce division, becoming Head of Partnerships for Google Wallet Instant Buy in September 2012.
A Twitter spokesperson has confirmed the hire, and also revealed that Dauman will be reporting to Nathan Hubbard, the former CEO of Ticketmaster, who was hired by Twitter in August of last year as its head of commerce.
Monday is his first day on the job.
Twitter has a number of other positions in the division that it is looking to fill out including Senior ProductManager, Product Marketing Manager and Senior Manager for Partnerships.
The job of the Senior Product Manager is to help "drive the vision and execution of Twitter’s commerce strategy." That means developing the product roadmap, as well as performing market and competitor analysis and determining product priorities.
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The Product Marketing Manager's job is "to grow awareness and adoption of its advertising products across the world." That means developing a go-to-market vision, strategy, and success metrics for new features.
Senior Manager for Partnerships will helps incubate Twitter's commerce business by acting as a strategic partner reporting for the VP of Commerce. The responsibilities including building, and managing, commerce partner relationships with Twitter's advertising clients.
Twitter obviously has a long way to go before it will truly be able to launch its commerce division, but it already might made one important partnership: earlier this year it was reported that Twitter was close to teaming up with Stripe for in-tweet payments.
The tweet was first spotted by ReCode on Monday.
(Image source: plus.google.com)
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Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests.
Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.
Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes.
We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.
There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.
In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet.
At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.
Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.
What's next for Twitter?
We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users.
We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.