Disclaimer: If you're an actual marketing professional, reading this post may cause brain damage. Really. It also may make you want to scream "No! You don't do it like that! Step away from the keyboard, now!".

I had a revelation today. Well, not really a relevation, not even a mini-enlightenment. Just kind of a realization.

It came to me when I was on all fours, and covered in sweat.

I was scrubbing my bathroom floor tiles, and I had a realization about Twitter.

But before we move on to my realization, let's step back a little and go back to the first post of this blog. In the post, I linked to my new Twitter account, @blogproduct, which I'm using to communicate about this blog. One of the main ideas behind this blog was to not spend that much money on marketing, but rather leverage social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

For some reason, I expected Twitter to be one of the shortcuts to happiness when it comes marketing this blog. It took me only 48 hours to realize it wasn't. During the last 48 hours, Twitter has brought in 11 visitors to this blog. My account has 74 followers right now, so this means only around 15% of the followers have followed a link either from the profile or from my tweets. To kickstart my Twitter marketing, I've encouraged people to follow the account with my normal account, I posted a intentionally eye-catching tweet pointing to my second post, and all but begged to get RT'd. All of the attempts failed pretty miserably.

So the realization?

Twitter, and using it for marketing, is a lot like cleaning my bathroom tiles: it's hard work, not all that fun, and I need to get my hands dirty if I want to get anything done.

Currently, most of my followers seem to have the same agenda as me: drive traffic somewhere. A lot of them have 10k+ followers. So if I post something using my account, what are the odds that it'll be noticed? Pretty much non-existant. I began going for quantity of followers, thinking that if I get hundreds of followers, that'll be enough to have enough people read and retweet me.

So I need to get quality followers, and a lot of them. Users that are actually interested in seeing what I post. This brings us to a rather large issue: I need to start coming up with interesting content.

That might be a problem...

Oh, and to finish off:

1. Follow me on Twitter!
2. Re-tweet this post by clicking on the "Retweet" -button on the right-hand side of this post.

In an intrestingly titled article on Advertising Age, "Twitter: A Vampire That Can Legally Suck the Life out of You", Simon Dumenco reigns down on Twitter's new terms of service. Following the fiasco of the Facebook TOS change just a little over six months ago, Simon sees similarities between the terms and cries wolf.

Reading his article, I remembered a conversation with a corporate lawyer a while back regarding different TOS's for websites. He stated that:

"You don't need a good terms of service that's full of legalese for the good days. For those days, a simple set of bullet points will do. But when the bad day comes, you're going to be happy if your TOS is full of legalese and less full of loopholes."

And looking this from Twitter's point of view, this seems to be exactly what they're doing. One of the point's that has been causing a stir, is the excerpt of the TOS that defines ownership and distribution of the tweets:

"By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, nonexclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed)."

Yes, it does give Twitter basically the right to do anything with your tweets. But given the nature of Twitter, it might be even a good thing. A big part of Twitter is it's API that allows developers to extend Twitter, even create new services based on it. Given that, how could we expect a TOS that says "we won't touch your tweets, we'll just display them on our website"? Distributing, aggregating, allowing access to the tweets. It's a complex equation that Twitter needs to balance legally as well as technically.

Some still cry out and claim that Twitter has too many rights over the content. As there are similarities between the new Twitter TOS and Facebook's infamous we-own-it-all TOS, why isn't Twitter all that evil? Simple: the content produced to the services is vastly different.

Of course never-ending arguments could be had over the value of a 140-character tweet, but we have to accept the fact that the probability of an average user providing something immaterially valuable to Twitter is a lot lower than it's on Facebook. Why? Facebook's vast amount of pictures and videos uploaded by the users. To create something worthy of snagging off of Twitter is hard. Uploading a cool photograph on Facebook that could be used in commercial work isn't that hard.

But what it all actually boils down to is: even if the Twitter TOS would give Twitter rights over the tweets so that they could sell them for money, without giving you a penny, why would they?

Think about it for a while.

Now that you've thought about it, consider which is more likely:

1. Twitter tries to rip off the users, selling the content for money for profit
2. Twitter tries to create a safe legal base for it's service and for that, they need to create a TOS that allows them to develop freely and won't stop them from allowing deeper integration for third-party tools

If you chose option 1, do you see Twitter having a future?

Oh, and if you chose option 1, please check the proper adjustment of your headgear.