Advertisers all a-Twitter

This morning I had a quick chat with SmartCompany blogger Paul Wallbank, who is off to Cannes on the French Riviera next week for the International Advertising Festival. Yes, sounds like very hard work.

Paul made a very good point about the festival program and its list of guest speakers (which you can see here) – rather than the usual line-up of advertising types, the featured speakers are led by Twitter founder Biz Stone, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer, Google founder Eric Schmidt and David Plouffe, who led Barack Obama’s incredibly successful campaign, which relied quite heavily on social media.

It’s hard to think of a hotter speaker line-up, but the social media gurus in attendance should perhaps have a bit of a think about why they have been invited – the advertising and branding experts are keen to continue the process of subverting their carefully built social networks for the purpose of marketing.

Perhaps there’s nothing wrong with that, although Twitter users often get upset with the use of the service for overt marketing, and web users have been quick to move away from social media networks that become less about community and more about commerce – the sharp fall in MySpace’s market share since News Corp bought the site could be seen as proof of that.

Anyway, Paul has promised to report back to the SmartCompany community on his French adventure and the festival. It promises to be a fascinating event!