• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, May 20, 2013

If Sidney Falco, the PR guy played by Tony Curtis in the 1957 classic “The Sweet Smell Of Success,” wanted to get his story out today, he most likely wouldn’t do it with a press release, or even a power lunch. He’d tweet it.

That’s essentially what Guy Yalif, head of global product marketing at Twitter, suggested during his opening keynote at OMMA Social in New York this morning. While he never explicitly made an analogy with that movie, he did deliver 140 reasons why “140 characters” can be powerful “real-time signals” for marketers, brands, content, etc.

One example shown by Yalif was American Express’ new tweet-based consumer promotion platform. Dubbed Amex Sync, the financial services marketer basically tweets offers directly to consumers.

“You can actually use tweets to deliver purchases all the way down the funnel,” Yalif boasted, alluding to the obligatory “marketing funnel.”

In the case of Amex Sync, he said there’s no need to show your phone or even you credit card to respond to an Amex offer, just your hashtag.

“Now imagine some of your products in that experience,” Yalif suggested, adding, “No coupon, nothing to print out, simple, smooth integratiton. It’s a great way to activate these marketing moments.”

Those offers can even be micro targeted via the micro blogging platform. To illustrate it, Yalif showed a case study Twitter did utilizing a “fictitious” travel site dubbed “Vacation Central.” Yalif said Twitter used it to target consumers like “Annie,” who sent signals of their travel intent by tweeting words like “vacation” and “Mexico.”

“This enables Vacation Central to take advantage of these marketing moments,” Yalif said, by effectively inserting a product of promotional offer directly into “people’s timelines.”

“Every tweet is a signal,” Yalif concluded.

This post initially appeared in Show Daily on May 20.