Breakfast fries

The Twitter IPO is either a step for social or a premonition of its impending doom, just ask Jeremy Probert.

Unfortunately, every time I pick up the Wall Street Journal, I hear the words breakfast fries. It’s a Pavlovian response, stemming from a trip to San Francisco some years ago. Every morning, before my stroll to the office (this sounds far, far better than it was, trust me) I would have breakfast with a copy of the WSJ.

And every morning, at around page three, the waiter would take my order (eggs on toast, sunny side up, since you ask) (a Freudian selection, had I been reading The Sun) and, lowering his voice, would ask whether I required breakfast fries. And I would say no, but my curiosity as to the nature of ‘breakfast fries’ became unbearable. On the last morning, I cracked and indicated that, indeed, I would have breakfast fries.

Obviously, I should have seen it coming - breakfast fries are chips. Of course they are. So I sat there, in this splendid dining room, in San Francisco, in my suit, with my copy of the WSJ, and had egg’n’chips. The incongruity of the situation was not lost on me.

So, the WSJ (breakfast fries!) has been reporting on Twitter’s planned IPO. Two things here – by the time you read this, Twitter will, in all probability, be listed on the NYSE and have a value of $11 billion. And there are really only two social media (‘Book being the other) and they are the benchmark for the sorry rag-tag and bobtail that make up the rest of social.

I don’t have the word count, the time or, indeed, the inclination to chronicle the rise and rise of Twitter and, besides, you know it all already. It has turned out to be quite the communications tool, and, a good thing from where I’m standing, it has forced many an individual, company and organisation to really consider reputation and stakeholder perception and give their dusty crisis management manuals a damn good brush-up.

But – it’s limited. By its very format and by the behaviour of, and the content posted by, the majorityofitsusers.MancannotliveonTwitter alone, campaigns are not made of Twitter, Twitter should not be central to a comms plan and – most importantly – you shouldn’t be lavishing your hard-won budget bucks on a Twitter strategy. 

Back to the WSJ (breakfast fries!) which has documented the progress of the Twitter IPO from initial filings in July to the possibility of the company setting a final price on 6 November.

The (breakfast fries!) WSJ reports that Twitter Inc has suggested a price of between $17 and $20 a share, which would value the company at $11.1 billion.

Now I’m going to quote directly from the article in the BFJ (Wall Street!), “If the offering is well-received, it could signal that investors are willing to wager on a big future for social media companies, even in the absence of profits, which Twitter doesn’t have.”

Hazarding a guess, I’d say the lack of profit is down to revenues from ads and sponsorship being less than Twitter’s cost of operation. This’ll be due to large corporates not putting their money where their 140 characters are. And yet, without doubt, some of these same corporates are going to invest money in Twitter shares, in the hope that they’ll get a return. They’re saying, “We don’t believe in the value of Twitter as a commercial tool, but we think that someone else will, so much so that Twitter will turn a profit and we’ll get a return.” Are they betting that others are more stupid than them – or admitting that they lack vision? Twitter is a fad, and its valuation a result of terrified people not wanting to be left out – just in case. There is talk of new Twitter tools on the way, which will make targeted advertising easier and more efficient – but $1.1 billion seems a high price for talk.