Simrat Tatla's Blog

Reading my classmate Enzo’s blog about how Twitter has become so powerful that there is now a company called Sponsored Tweets that pays celebrities and influential/popular “tweeters” to tweet about their products, had me realize how Twitter has become a huge disintermediary in the marketing industry. Twitter allows celebrities themselves to update their statuses and pictures about where they currently are and what they are currently doing and I think their “followers” feel a more personal connection with them because they can comment on the pictures and reply to the tweets and create some sort of contact with the celebrity. Sponsored Tweets knows that if the celebrities tweet about their products to their followers and encourage them to go purchase it, it will have a major effect on their sales results. Even if a celebrity is in a commercial for a product, consumers have it in the back of their mind that the commercial is scripted and that the celebrity is getting paid to promote this product; however, since Twitter is made for people to share short status updates about their lives, a celebrity saying how much they love a product and taking a picture with it off their own cell phone and sharing it with their followers, makes people believe that the celebrity actually supports the product.

This is a picture that Kourtney Kardashian updated on her twitter to promote her own line at Sears.

Even magazine sales in the US  have decreased 10% in 2011, as comsumers can get this same information online straight from the celebrity through websites like Twitter, Facebook, CelebrityBuzz (an online celebrity blog website) and not other secondary sources provided by the magazine.

I feel that the internet is a crucial factor that plays a role in the substantial increase of disintermediaries now as it helps to create direct sales channels from the manufacturer and the consumer. Twitter especially plays a major role in developing more personal connections with their users, as following celebrities and viewing their updates is extremely similar to viewing the users own friends updates.