There are few departments more crucial to Twitter's growth than media. I mean, just look at how much time and effort the company put into developing its relationship with television advertisers last year! Given that ddvertising makes up virtually all of Twitter's revenue, developing those relationships, and consequently getting more of them on board with Twitter's ad platform, is incredibly important.
Sadly for Twitter, it recently lost its liason to global media companies when Chloe Sladden left the company last month. Happily, though, it had someone waiting in the wings who could easily step into the role.
Twitter had promoted Katie Stanton, its VP of International Strategy, as its VP of global media, according to a report from Variety. Stanton also updated her Twitter profile with the new position.
Stanton has quite an impressive resume, with experience in a multitude of different sectors, including both tech and government. She ranks at number 56 in Forbes’ list of Power Women, worked for the Yahoo from 1999 to 2002 as Group Production Manager. Specifically, Stanton was the driving force behind Yahoo Finance, the main trump card Yahoo has had over Google.
She also helped develop Google Finance when she worked at Google from 2003 to 2009.
After her stints with Google and Yahoo, Stanton went on to work for the State Department, where she worked with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to develop the mobile donation campaign Text Haiti, following the devastating earthquake in Haiti. She was also the White House’s first Director of Citizen Participation and was responsible for getting the White House on Twitter.
She has been with Twitter since mid-2010, where she develoloped relationships with media companies such as the BBC and Brazil's Globo.
In her new role, Stanton will be working with media companies around the world, in an effort to court TV networks, Hollywood studios and other media companies onto the Twitter advertising platform.
Stanton currently works out of Paris, but will be returning to the company's San Francisco office. She will report to Gabriel Stricker, who was recently promoted to the head of media after the departure of Twitter COO Ali Rowghani in June.
Twitter media
To understand how important media is to Twitter, all you have to do is look at its efforts to ingratiate itself to television over the last year.
Twitter premiered its TV ad targeting software in beta mode in May of last year, and then expanded to to all U.S. advertisers that run national television spots in July. The technology allows advertisers to engage directly with people on Twitter who have been exposed to their ads on live television.
It works by identifying Tweets that correspond with that television show. Because the person was engaged enough to tweet about it, the company figures that they watched the ads as well (which, in all honesty, is a bit of a leap. It is more likely they were sending the tweets in question while the ads were playing). Twitter will then push out promoted tweets that extend those advertisements.
In addition, Twitter strengthened its position with TV advertisers by showing them, in a Nielsen study released in August of 2013, that tweets can drive higher ratings for their shows, and that those shows caused a spike in tweets. TV and Twitter, it seems, have something of a symbiotic relationship.
Twitter also made a number of acquisitions in this space as well.
It purchased real-time TV data company Trendrr to help make those ads more relevant. Then, in March of this year, it made two more social television purchases: Mesagraph, a French real-time search and discovery platform for social media; and SecondSync, a provider of social TV analytics solutions to the UK TV and Advertising industries.
Most recently it bought SnappyTV, whih offers a suite of tools that enable organizations to edit, share, and archive live video and TV programming completely within the cloud.
VatorNews has reached out to Twitter for confirmation on Stanton's appointment, but the company would not comment.
(Image source: allthingsd.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.
