As part of West's engagement with Twitter, our CEO served as acting CMO of the company. The assignment was to help Twitter prepare for its IPO by building its audience and evolving its brand. There were several aspects to the engagement, including a new brand identity and guidelines for partner marketing, a redesign of the main product experience, developing provocations for new ways to on-board users, and restructuring the marketing function within the company.
My role was leading a very lean team across all of this work.
SCALING twitter
CREATING A SECOND SCREEN EXPERIENCE
One major priority was driving growth in active usage of the platform.
It’s no surprise that Twitter usage spikes during live events—be it a presidential debate, a boxing match, a hurricane, an episode of Game of Thrones. The challenge was to figure out how to convert that activity into continued usage beyond the event.
To try to solve this, we assembled a cross-functional team from product, engineering, media, editorial, design, and pr and created a series of experiments to try and expose great content on the platform using a variety of events in 2012. Part of my role was representing west (consumer marketing) on this team.
The product tested a number of new features for Twitter, including pinned tweets and whitelists. This was also the first attempt at making Twitter a more visual experience, by introducing a photo gallery at the top of the timeline. The thinking and learnings from this project provided the foundation for Twitter Moments.
#NASCAR
The #events product test debuted in partnership with #NASCAR. Though it may seem an odd partner, there were advantages to having a weekly recurring event that had a sizable television audience with plenty of opportunity to grow on the platform.
As part of the partnership with NASCAR and its broadcast partners, Twitter got airtime during the races to promote #NASCAR. Twitter had not done any mainstream advertising up to this point, and we wanted to create something that would be distinct and true to Twitter. We worked with NASCAR Media Group to source footage from their archives and augmented that with shoots at Talladega, Darlington, and the All-Star Race in Charlotte.
We made nearly thirty different spots that aired over the course of the summer of 2012.
#OLYMPICS
As a part of Twitter's partnership was NBC and the IOC, we deployed the #events product for the 2012 Olympics in London. This was obviously a lot higher profile than the NASCAR experience.
We developed about fifty different lines of copy for potential #Olympics spots and gave those to the team at NBC to use as a filter for identifying great Twitter moments from the Olympics that might make a good spot. We had an editor in NBC's control room in London focused on finding moments to feature and then together we wrote additional lines.
We had over forty different spots in the Olympics, each produced the morning it went on-air.
#ELECTION2012
As the Olympics were happening, we were also working with the DNC, RNC, and the Commission on Presidential Debates to use the #events product for the Democratic and Republican conventions and the Presidential Debates.
We did not produce any television advertising for these initiatives—instead our focus was on leveraging partnerships with the major networks to help feature #election2012 content from Twitter on-air.