No Business Model? Dell Has Made $1 Million from Twitter

A post by InternetNews reveals that Dell has made $1 million in sales directly from sending product alerts to people following Dell’s Twitter account.
This news comes at the same time that Twitter is in the process of hiring a product manager to head up the task of monetizing the micro-blogging service.
We reported earlier on Twitter CEO Evan Williams’ statement that he doesn’t want to raise any money in ‘09, going further to promise the service will turn on a revenue stream in Q1 of the new year. He was so confident that in November the company turned down a $500-million-in-Facebook-stock acquisition bid.
Dell has shown that even without a business model, Twitter is being put to commercial use quite successfully. Twitter just has to figure out how to get a piece of the pie.
Even if a business model doesn’t arrive tomorrow, you can bet that a service that companies are deriving real value from won’t go away anytime soon.
I’m personally waiting for spam to hit Twitter hard. There are lot of affiliate marketing opportunities on the service that have not been exploited yet and it won’t be pretty.

David Heyerman

Seth Godin has some pretty interesting insights on this subject, check it out: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/12/brands-social-c.html

John Jorgensen

@jason, I think as long as the offers are relevant they will be effective. As Twitter becomes more crowded people will probably stop following people whose tweets have no value before a company whose products provide value for them.

=jason

@John, I feel like Tiwtter messages coming from corporations will be effective for a short time, but the long term feasibility is not possible. It's just like how MySpace was once used as a promotional tool for businesses, and now its overly saturated.