According to The New York Times, Twitter will today announce its first serious attempt at a revenue earning model. Through an advertising program known as Promoted Tweets, companies will be able to purchase the rights to keywords and have their ads strategically placed into related user search results. Not without transparency, Promoted Tweets will labelled as such. According to Twitter, the key benefit of the program is companies will be able to spread their message without fear of it being overlooked. How much companies will pay to participate in the program is unclear, but at the moment Twitter will be charging per 1,000 unique views (CPM) until it has a clear understanding of how the public will react. Users of third-party applications are safe from Promoted Tweets for the time being, but Twitter is presently working on a method to track the number of ad views in applications so it can create a revenue sharing deal with developers. So far Best Buy, Bravo, Starbucks and Virgin America have signed up for the program, but more are sure to come along. In the future, the program will be expanded into one’s timeline.

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AT&T’s reputation has been dragged through the mud these past few years in no small part to its network issues, so it comes as little surprise that the company is all set to go through with a major rebranding effort. Based around the slogan “Rethink Possible” (Think Different much?), AT&T will position itself not as a communications giant but as purveyor of a progressive and innovative lifestyle. AT&T’s “Death Star” logo will remain, although the lowercase “at&t” will be dropped, while the overwhelming orange motif that assaults one’s senses will be discarded in favor of a wider spectrum of colors. The entire rebranding process will take a considerable amount of time given the sheer scope of the task, but let’s hope Luke Wilson’s reign of terror will be one of the first things to go.

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When it comes to branding, marketing, advertising, PR and the general concepts surrounding efforts to sell stuff, Apple is one of the best in the business — hands down. Love Apple products or hate them, there’s really no question it knows how design an attractive product and make it even more attractive using marcom. As such, the company is always meticulous with the messages it delivers, the wording it chooses and the quality of its marketing/advertising — well, almost always.

Its latest product, the iPhone 3GS, is a smash hit. It launched this past Friday in fewer countries than the iPhone 3G did last year and still managed to sell over a million handsets in its opening weekend — more units than its predecessor in fact. Remarkable. There is a major fault in Apple’s new handset however, that we likely wouldn’t have seen under Stevo’s watch: the branding. Yes, we’re sure Jobs played a major role in naming the device and we can’t believe “3GS” is what the crew in Cupertino landed on but considering how peculiar and unfriendly to search engines the name is, one would think the company would take particular care in referring to the handset. Nope. According to Apple, the official name of its new handset is “iPhone 3GS”. Fair enough. Take a look at Apple’s website at the time of this writing however, and you’ll find no less than a hundred references to the “iPhone 3G S” — with a space between the “3G” and the “S”. Crazy. This is also how the handset was presented when it was introduced earlier this month: “3G S”.

To be honest, we can’t remember ever having seen Apple fail so massively in this department. It may seem trivial but companies take branding extremely seriously for several reasons and all of these reasons play key roles in the marketing/sales processes. Apple is cleaning up its site and changing “3G S” to “3GS” but even now there are still a few omissions. The screen cap above was taken this morning and it shows less than a quarter of a page with four mistakes alone.

So welcome back, Mr. Jobs. Time to get to work.