A number of the Trending Topics listed in Twitter’s year end top trends lists contained listings from sponsor’s promoted tweets.
Two movies that made the list Scott Pilgrim vs the World and perhaps appropriately Despicable Me were advertisers/sponsors, as was MTV Music Video Awards which topped the Television category, Time Magazine’s Techland reported
“Given their follow-it-live nature, entertainment awards shows were naturally dominant on the TV trends list. But the top spot goes not to the Oscars or the Grammys, but to the MTV Video Music Awards, which created an official “Twitter Tracker” app in conjunction with the service in order to spur more discussion,” Cnet noted.
“Twitter’s year-end list seems to prove the potential for manipulating mass conversations–both on behalf of advertisers and via more impromptu viral campaigns–just as much as it proves that Twitter itself has moved far beyond the service that would crash during every Steve Jobs keynote. So maybe this dilutes the “authenticity” of what’s getting talked about on Twitter. It also, quite likely, hints that its fledgling business model has potential“.