Hey Twitter, your business model is showing

Written on 11th September 2008                                                                                                              1 COMMENT
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer

Twitter founder Evan Williams tweetpoints (I totally coined that term!) to a job listing for the company on Craigslist, which shows at least one direction Twitter is turning in the infamous search for a business model. The position offered is one for a ‘Partner Relations Coordinator’, and these are the tidbits that reveal a little more about where it’s heading:

“Each month, Twitter gets contacted by hundreds of businesses, consumer brands, events, celebrities, non-profits, agencies and other organizations who want to use Twitter in various ways. The goal of the Partner Relations Coordinator is to work with these entities, while maximizing our relationships and opportunities with current/future partners to grow the Twitter community worldwide.”

You could say that this is partly a customer service role, and that would be true. But this also shows Twitter is looking for more ways to engage with partners and help them use Twitter. I’m sure that eventually, the company will start charging for some of these services.

I realize I’m stating some obvious things here and that there’s not exactly ground-breaking stuff to be found, but it’s interesting to see them starting to think about what to do with the microsharing service now that it has quite some adoption and momentum going for it.

Two of the roles for the new hire will be:

Identify strategic new potential partners in key verticals, including live events/festivals, music (and others TBD) to onboard them to Twitter.

Implement partner programs and processes, including managing database and tracking effectiveness of resulting partner campaigns.

Partners? Verticals? Databases? Tracking effectiveness? Campaigns?

Sure smells like marketing to me. :)