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March 23, 2007

John Edwards on Twitter Actually Makes Marketing Sense

Since this Twitter thing has been all some tech bloggers can talk about these days, we've been wondering if there is -- or ever will be -- a marketing angle for the technology. Besides ego-driven bloggers looking for industry notoriety or more consulting gigs, perhaps the first marketing- or promotionally-related usage thus far by a full-fledged advertiser is The John Edwards campaign's use of the one-to-many text-messaging service.

The last time he used Twitter to send a message, or as we like to say here at ClickZ, "twitted," was a few days ago -- March 19th. ("Great event at Benedict College, Columbia SC today. Lots of energy. Headed to Iowa tonight.") I'll bet he'll be back soon though.

I have to say that since this service fell under my radar, I haven't altered my initial reaction, which was, essentially, "Who cares where you are or what you're doing at this exact minute, you self-absorbed dork?"

The Edwards case, however, has me rethinking this. People do care where political candidates are at any given moment. For the campaign to be experimenting with this makes sense. In a way, by displaying the candidate in more of a real-time sense, it feels more casual, and almost seems like it makes him more accessible. It's all nuanced, feely stuff, but for many people, the feeling we get from a candidate is what drives our opinion of that individual as opposed to the actual issues.

Update: Looks like Woot's doing it, too. See Rebecca's post below.

Posted by Kate Kaye at March 23, 2007 2:57 PM

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