Twitter’s $48 Million in Free Media

I thought this was very interesting from AdAge:

Twitter’s been the toast of TV news programs, daytime talk shows, magazine editors and newspaper reporters. But what’s all that chatter worth?

According to news-monitoring service VMS, a cool $48 million over the past 30 days. (That’s half of what Microsoft plans to spend marketing its biggest product launch of the year, Bing.)

Twitter received almost 3 billion impressions — 2.73 billion, to be exact — in the past month, a time period that doesn’t even include the frenzied weeks in April in which Oprah and Ellen weighed in on the micro-blogging service.

Most startups rely on PR and media coverage instead of marketing for obvious reasons (cost). But there’s no way really to generate something like this without the help of external events such as the Iranian elections and their aftermath.

And here’s the ironic tale of another startup PR launch that largely failed, only to see success after the fact based on an unintended article discussing the strategy behind the launch.

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