SocialMedia.com is excited to be invited to exhibit at the OMMA Global conference March 17-18 in San Francisco. With 75 sponsors handpicked to exhibit and over 3,000 media and marketing professionals expected to attend, it should be a terrific show!
The best part of the show is that MediaPost is making the entire event FREE this year! If you haven’t signed up yet you can still do so here.
SocialMedia.com will have a booth in the main expo hall (#320) where we’ll be showing off our new ad technology platform with interactive demos of our social ads.
As mentioned in the blog title we’ll also be giving away a free iPad! To enter the drawing all you need to do is participate in our “social targeting” bean bag toss game. By playing the game you will also have a chance to win other prizes – if your aim is good!
So please stop by our booth to say hi and check out our ads. We hope to see you there!
Social media defines a new era of online advertising
As Facebook, Twitter, and other social media have become important in our lives, we have come to expect a similar social experience when interacting with all digital content — including ads. This presents advertisers with a huge challenge, but also an opportunity to engage online audiences in new and compelling ways. Transparency, responsiveness, genuine dialogue, and ethics take center stage in the battle for revenue.
At the same time, Web 2.0 has birthed a new breed of company, while changing many established company’s attitudes toward their customers. This new mindset will lead to a generation of advertising in which good companies are selling good products and services to exactly the people who want them, bringing word of mouth into a new era.
Social ads are Ads 2.0
Ads 2.0, the next generation of ads, are moving away from static, impersonal, mass-produced propaganda, to dynamic, customized, personal content. Similarly, social ads are a more useful, relevant, and personal type of advertising which benefits publishers and advertisers, as well as users. That’s why we are excited to be creating social ads that transform real messages from real people into authentic sponsored content.
Seth Goldstein (Co-Founder and Chairman of SocialMedia.com) introduced our vision of Ads 2.0 at the 2010 IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. His slides from the presentation are available on SlideShare here. A recap of the event can be found on the IAB’s website here.
On Monday, February 22 SocialMedia.com announced the launch of the first technology platform that powers social ad solutions for publishers and their advertisers. Our announcement occurred at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting in Carlsbad, California.
“We partner closely with publishers, bringing them innovative ad products to capture the vast advertising opportunity in social media. Publishers get a solution that works well, works simply, and works at massive scale.” - Kurt Abrahamson, CEO of SocialMedia.com
SocialMedia.com’s new platform enables publishers to bring the unique, vibrant voices of their communities to life through advertising. The platform transforms real messages from real people into authentic sponsored content. This unprecedented technology features social influence ranking and self-learning optimization that delivers the most relevant personal message to individual users.
“As a strategic partner with SocialMedia.com, we’re excited to leverage their more robust platform. IDG has seen substantial campaign lift for our clients with SocialMedia.com’s current product portfolio.” - Jeremy Rueb, Vice President of IDG Strategic Marketing Services
We are the only company focused on providing publishers with custom, social advertising solutions enabling them to maximize the value from the communities on their sites.
Netexplorateur has named SocialMedia.com as a 2010 “Netexplorateur of the Year” for it’s People-Powered Ads.
We are psyched to be receiving this award just weeks before officially launching our new end-to-end social advertising platform that enables publishers to create compelling social ads that tap into the voices of their unique, vibrant communities. People-Powered Ads flow from the platform, using real messages from real people.
Below, Seth Goldstein answers the question: Did People-Powered Advertising stem from the limitations of conventional media advertising?
Netexplorateur is an independent global observatory for information and analysis on the issues in the ongoing digital revolution. It creates an annual list of the top 100 most important emerging trends in the digital world.
The Netexplorateur Forum is a unique event where 600 French decision-makers from the business, political, and media spheres discover and analyze new practices and products thought up by digital innovators worldwide. The event will be held February 4 and 5.
SocialMedia.com interviews new CEO, Kurt Abrahamson. Kurt comes to the SocialMedia.com team from Google where he led the product launch of Google AdSense. In this video, Kurt answers questions about his experience at Google and explains why he joined SocialMedia.com.
Forecasts and predictions about twenty-ten are EVERYWHERE. We looked deep into our crystal ball here at SocialMedia.com, but it seems someone swapped it for a beach ball.
So rather than try to guess the future, we put together a list of five emerging trends that are already stirring up social advertising. To be successful in 2010, you must plan for how these trends will impact your business.
1. No stone is left unturned when it comes to finding social data.
Social networks are gaining a larger chunk of online advertising dollars, in large part due to the effectiveness of using social data from these sites to deliver targeted brand messages. But data from social graphs is not exclusive to social networks. As more money shifts to social networks, traditional publishers will want to get a piece of the action.
TAKEAWAY:To offer social data to advertisers, publishers are working hard to uncover and grow their existing social graphs – and succeeding. Don’t get left behind.
2. Social relationships are more than just friends.
At SocialMedia.com, we break social relationships down into one of three categories: friends, influencers, and communities.
Friends are the easiest to spot; they are a one-to-one connection, approved by both parties (e.g. connections on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Foursquare, etc.).
Influencers are characterized by a one-to-many relationship, bloggers and micro-bloggers being the best examples. For instance, a wine lover blogs about new wines she has discovered and others wine drinkers read her blog and view her opinions as a trusted source of information, even though she does not know the identity of all her readers.
Communities include individuals who are largely anonymous to each other, but relate to the group around a similar interest (characterized by a many-to-many relationship). For example, fans of new TV show might discuss recent episodes in a discussion forum. In this particular case the community may only last for the duration of the television series. In other cases, the community relationship may persist much longer, e.g. moms trading advice on a website dedicated to parenthood.
TAKEAWAY:Because communities have been largely overlooked as a significant social relationships, there is a tremendous opportunity to execute social campaigns on sites other than social networks, where the voice of a given site and/or community is leveraged as a whole. This opportunity appears even more promising when advertisers consider the upward trend of online users embracing social activities and identifying with online communities. (We believe that the nuances of social relationships are so important that we’ll be following up with another blog post that digs deeper into this topic).
3. Consumers turn to online social connections for recommendations.
The rapid growth (not to mention sheer number) of social media users is bolstering the credibility and perceived value of social media channels, tools, and most importantly, content. This larger base of active users allows people to connect with virtual peer groups in more niche categories. For example, a foodie follows a list of local restaurant critics on twitter, a CIO joins a LinkedIn group for IT leaders and discusses cloud computing, an indie rock fan blogs about new bands and other indie rock fans read her posts. These connections are real and authentic (establishing trust) and are hyper-targeted, which means users get highly tailored opinions by turning to these groups.
TAKEAWAY: More open-minded consumers actively seeking advice and recommendations from online peer groups, creates a gold mine for advertisers who can be armed and ready with real brand messages from real people.
4. Online endorsements are happening in real time.
Not only are more consumers using online social connections as an input for decision-making, but when they do they are also finding real-time information from other consumers. Reviews of retail locations are posted before consumers even leave the stores. Bad (and good) customer service experiences are tweeted, blogged, and posted to social networks within seconds, when emotions run highest. And all of the content created in real time is distributed immediately through viral actions like posts, shares, and retweets. Moreover, new services like Aardvark allow users to pose questions via web, chat applications, twitter, or Facebook to get immediate answers from an extended network of peers. What does it mean? Your reaction to real-time reviews must be in real time too.
TAKEAWAY: By monitoring real-time conversations, brands can put out fires, leverage positive endorsements, and participate in the conversation. But that’s just scratching the surface. Brands that go beyond monitoring may find opportunities to initiate endorsements at the time of interaction by providing prompts and channels to leave feedback, thus maximizing positive word-of-mouth recommendations.
5. The objectives of online creative are shifting from consumable to sharable.
As a social online experience becomes the new norm, online display advertising follows. Whereas in the past online advertisers wanted big flashy ads that shouted messages and captured eyeballs, now advertisers want ads that inspire consumers to take action, particularly using social channels to spread brand messages to friends and followers.
TAKEAWAY:Our experience and research at SocialMedia.com has shown that the most effective ads: 1) include real people, 2) spread real messages, and 3) are adapted to the environment in which they are served.
SocialMedia.com is excited to announce that we’ve hired a great media exec to join the company as CEO. His name is Kurt Abrahamson and he comes most recently from Google where he worked for Tim Armstrong and helped launch AdSense. His experience is perfectly suited to what we are trying to accomplish with our social advertising platform for publishers.
Seth Goldstein has transitioned to the role of Chairman, where he will work closely with Kurt and the team to continue advancing our position in the emerging social media marketing industry and cultivating key customer relationships.
Seth said: “We are fortunate to have somebody join our team who understands the complex needs of media companies. Kurt’s work at Google with publishers will be of great value as we continue to scale our business.”
Kurt added: “Just as with AdSense where publishers were able to monetize directly from paid search, SocialMedia.com is helping publishers do the same from social media. I’m excited to be bringing this social advertising platform to life. It’s the first of its kind enabling publishers to offer social advertising solutions at scale.”
Kurt comes to SocialMedia.com from Google where he first served as Director of the Content Media Group, leading the global launch of Google AdSense. Kurt managed the direct sales channel for publishers and secured long-term deals with five of the top ten web properties. He also served as the Director of Global Sales & Operations Strategy and as Director of Sales Operations for North America.
Prior to working at Google, Kurt served as COO of Jupiter Communications and President of Jupiter Media Metrix from 1994 to 2003. He helped build Jupiter’s business from a 12-person office to one of the leading Internet research organizations, with over 520 employees worldwide. He grew and guided the sales team to secure over 40% market share, establishing Jupiter’s position as one of the leading sources of Internet research.
Ever since our company started with Trakzor, Foodfight and Appsaholic back in 2007, we have pivoted the business a number of times to stay ahead of the curve. Based on our experience prototyping solutions for companies like MySpace and IDG, not to mention what we learned over two years from our Facebook campaigns, we have been busy coding an entirely new technology platform that we plan to release at the end of Q1. It will be the first solution for publishers that enables the authoring, serving and reporting of social ads — ads that aren’t just shouting for attention, but have real people saying real things about brands.
