Imagine Twitter as a Brand-Controlled Resource

Oooooo, great! Another Twitter toy epiphany. Never mind stats that say 70% of first-time users do not come back after their initial tweet.

Of course, we all know how consumers are just waiting for us advertisers to invade any new space they create, in large part, to get away from the tent-show brand evangelism we usually represent.

Like, for instance, shanghaiing Sockington, a Twittering "cat" I read about on another blog, with a half million followers, who this really cool, techno-trend-sucking advertising agency proposes to line up as a brand ambassador for Meow Mix cat food. Oh, yeah, dude, Sockington fans are going "embrace" that little bit of "brand engagement" about as readily as a Rush Limbaugh/Hillary Clinton clinch.

But, you know, it's always the same with technologies that don't want to do what advertisers want them to. These are always the bad little children that tend to get notoriously snarky about things like finding, aggregating and displaying as a stand-alone feature "only positive Twitter chatter about their brand."

Which will inevitably mean that poor Sockington no longer has any right to make brand-denigrating comments about Meow Mix, or probably even cat food in general.

What if we Twitter toyed Dilbert like that? Can anyone imagine him having to skirt not only around any deletorious mention of a particular brand, but simultanously having to wear its logo on the tip of his upturned tie? Oh, I'm sure that would make readers just happy enough to launch a banzai attack on the editorial leadership of any paper stupid enough to run the silly thing.

Maybe, though, some real smart ad puppy can make this Dilbert thing into Twitter application. Yeah, that would work. After all, it's only for people who text 5 or 6 words at a time, so it should be like putting a big bowl full of Meow Mix in front of a bunch of hungry cat. They'll go nuts ... just maybe not in the way we'd imagined.