San Francisco — The blogosphere is buzzing with rumors from “people close to the negotiations” report that Google may be brooding to acquire the trendy microblogging site Twitter, but under the guise Google is trying to stream its AdSense units. Companies seeking to boost their twitter trails now have a fresh option: Google is now allowing advertisers to stream their Tweets on its AdSense network, according to AdAge reports.
According to AdAge, Google now provides ad units that allow marketers to stream their five most recent “tweets” across the AdSense network. This means, rather than placing a traditional ad on the network, a recent Tweet shows up. The first business to utilize the new AdSense service is Intuit, parent company of online tax filing service TurboTax, which is trying to boost its Twitter followers taking advantage of the impending tax season.
Clicking on the tweet takes the visitor to the company’s Twitter feed instead of diverting consumers to TurboTax’s homepage. Intuit used several of the measures available for any AdSense campaign to target the ads, which are running on sites such as Bebo, Facebook, Hi5, MySpace and Alltop.
“It is linking up whatever the team that works on the TurboTax Twitter account [@turbotax] posts,” said Seth Greenberg, director of marketing at Intuit. When a user clicks on an ad it takes them not to TurboTax.com but to twitter.com/turbotax.
TurboTax anticipates that the campaign will raise people’s awareness that the brand is listening and talking to their customers.
As many other companies and brands are discovering, advertising is not just about getting a message across, it is evolving into a dialogue in which companies, and not just customers, are actively involved.
The feature, which is still under experiment mode, is yet another sign that mainstream companies are taking Twitter seriously. Moreover, while Twitter is growing and had about 7 million unique visitors in February, Nielsen NetView pegs the active digital media universe as 167 million people.
The TurboTax ads are being displayed as the last two weeks of tax season — crunch time for tax-prep marketers. According to reports, Intuit’s tax brand spends more than $100 million in 10 weeks. Intuit, however did not specify how much it spent on this particular buy or whether the unit was sold at a premium ad rate.
TurboTax spokeswoman Colleen Gatlin handles the Twitter account, along with her public-relations team and Christine Morrison, social-marketing manager at the company.
“We are creating awareness in the social community that we are here to help consumers,” she said.
Greenberg said he is still trying to work out exactly what a Twitter follower is worth from a marketing point of view, such as whether people have a greater propensity to become a customer when they are following a brand on Twitter or how valuable those customers are. But he is sure one of the advantages to the tool is its network effect.
“We are conducting research about people who are engage with us but also more interesting are their friends and followers,” he said. “People can influence others in their own networks.”
The power to put real-time feeds and data into ad units has existed for years, but one of the technological limitations of this particular execution was that users can not actually click on links that are included in the “tweets,” or posts by users. Right now, the feed only pulls from TurboTax’s Twitter account, rather than pulling a stream of tweets that mention the brand or tax-related issues.
A Google spokesman said it is carrying out a “limited” tests with a “small number of advertisers and publishers.”