It Should Have Happened: Professional Branding Comes to Twitter

I am sure that every Twitter user has already seen this or that example of marketing or promotion on Twitter. We have also seen ideas that popular users can monetize their accounts with huge numbers of followers by using some brand’s logo for their avatars and skinning for their entire pages. Today we finally see what should have been expected: marketing professionals offering their services to officially promote brands on Twitter (well, actually they seem to offer consulting services to teach companies how to use Twitter efficiently but still I’m sure they will execute some of the measures themselves once their first customer arrives).

I’ve stumbled upon a thread on FriendFeed introducing the newly launched service named Cherp – the agency offering branding and marketing services on Twitter and using a very familiar bird in its logo. The agency has been founded by Matthew Tharp, the guy behind theAnalogFormat, a design studio working on brand identity, web and graphic design. The information I’ve found about Matt on LinkedIn hints that this brand identity studio is something of a hobby to Matt while his main job is as a sales executive for BoldChat.

I believe that Matt must be a huge fan of Twitter himself as he has come up with an idea for an entire business based around Twitter. It is obvious that there are companies that have already started to realize the full potential of social media but unfortunately promoting a brand on Twitter (or any other social media service) takes at least some experience and knowledge (not to mention time). So if a company is offered some proper guidance on how exactly the company staff should behave on Twitter to target current and potential customers with a friendly yet powerful message, I believe such guidance will be very much welcomed by the corporate marketers.

In addition to offering branding on Twitter Cherp also advertises a service named “Twitter Platform Integration” which seems to be in helping a client to add a Twitter widget of this or that type to their websites or some other online properties.

I am very curious about two things here. First, it will be very interesting to get to know how such service are priced. Another thing is how exactly the agency will be targeting its prospective customers. I am sure it will hardly be on Twitter since ideally the companies seeking advice on how to use the micro-blogging community should not be on Twitter at all. But if they go with direct sales approach, I am sure it will involve lots of interesting conversation with prospective customers like “Twitter? Twitter what?”.

We all know that there are already numerous online marketing consultancies offering their clients advice on how to promote a service or a brand best via social media sites. The only thing that these consulters have not done yet is launching a special agency for Twitter only. But probably this niche marketing might be efficient enough for future Cherp clients to be satisfied.

What I will be looking forward to seeing on the site of Cherp is some feedback and testimonials from their customers – at least it will show which brands grow on Twitter naturally and which get a helping hand from Cherp. In the meanwhile I will keep wondering for how long Twitter will be providing a platform others monetize without making any money for the service itself.