Emarketer.com added a new article recently about ad spending in social networks. Since I just posted about social media and advertising , I thought this would be a great follow up.

Emarketer had previously released projections on ad spending in which they reduced in this most recent projection saying, "Today’s economy, combined with the fact that social networks are still trying to come up with successful ad models, has led to lowered ad spending projections for the next few years."

Here’s their projection model for the next few years.

And here’s a great comparison showing the estimated percentage social networking ad spending will be to that of total ad spending:

Here’s a link to their article. It’s a great read!

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

In a previous post, I blogged about Social Media and Advertising and how advertising on social media and UGC websites will have a moderate growth in the coming future. In this post, I’ll expand on the previous post as well as highlight the effectiveness of social media advertising in order to determine if it’s a valuable investment.

Social media advertising is not for every business or organization. For instance, ComScore released the results of a survey last year on advertising effectiveness with various mediums and the responsiveness of consumers to that advertising. Overall, they found that 28% of respondents were likely to notice advertising on social media and less than that 23% are likely to trust the advertisements they notice. Those numbers put social media websites at #5 on the list behind television, print, news and corporate websites.

Influencing Factors

Effectiveness can also be influenced by a number of factors.

Industry

There are certain industries that convert better on social sites than others. For the entertainment industry, 66% of respondents were more likely to be receptive to advertising on social media sites while 48% were more likely to be receptive on news and general media websites. At the same time, the telecom industry had the same number of respondents in both the social media and general media category. And for industries like pharmaceuticals and financial services, respondents were less likely to respond on social sites than they were on general media sites.

Audience

In any marketing campaign, you have to look at the demographics of the audience. Depending on the audience of a social media website, a campaign can have a better or worse response. There are networks available for any demographic you are looking for; from kids, to teenagers, to twenty and thirty somethings, to new moms, brides, sports fans, technology enthusiasts and more. Generally speaking, you have to find the right demographic for what you are marketing to have the best conversion.

Reach

For a social media site to be an effective medium, it has to have a large audience reach or a large audience that fits your demographic. For instance, according to compete.com, Facebook has a monthly audience of 31 million people and pageviews of 350 million. Now is that a targeted demographic, no; but with that number you can use targeting to filter down to your desired demographic.

Targeting

Social media has offered a tool that has not been best utilized until now. You see with social media, we’re better able to target our marketing campaigns to specific demographics because their advertising power is based on the personal information that is entered by the users. For instance, a singles website could target their advertising only to those consumers who are single and looking, a movie studio could target a specific age range that they think would be most interested in their film, and a college could target those who don’t have a college degree. The power of targeting is directly tied to the ability of the consumer to control the information they input in an online community.

Other factors

There are a number of other smaller factors that can influence social media advertising. Some of those include the mood of the consumer when they are influenced by your ad, their history with your company or brand, whether the information they’ve entered into their profile is really accurate, etc. These are smaller influences, but still important ones to consider.

Click Thru Rate

Does social media convert when it comes to click thru’s? First, let me say that I don’t have access to hard numbers when it comes to the average social media advertisements. What I can safely say from my research is that social media advertisements seem to have lower response rate than that of traditional online media. From my research, I have found certain networks, Facebook for example, to have anywhere from a 0.1% response rate to a 4% response rate depending upon the marketing campaign. With other online advertising mediums (Google Adwords in this instance), the response rate has been anywhere from 1% to 7% and higher (again depending upon the campaign).

Now, this isn’t to say that there are not social networks pulling really good numbers, but because Facebook is a large player, I wanted to pull a large average statistic.

This would indicate that social media advertising is a medium that still has some maturing yet to go. The power of it though, is phenomenal and social media will be a big player as time goes on and the industry advances, but for now, it’s not as great a medium as is offered by other online mediums.

I’ll be watching this trend closely and will update as time goes by. For updates and new items on this topic, follow me on twitter or friendfeed .

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Here’s another great article from eMarketer on Social Media and advertising.

They’ve extrapolated statistics on online adverting with social media and user generated content (UGC). Right now advertising on UGC content is only .77% of total online advertising, which is very minuscule considering the massive popularity of social networking websites and the impressive ability to target certain demographics.

By 2012, they estimate that growth in online advertising on UGC content will only reach 1.62% of total online advertising. Here’s their extrapolation:

Next time, I’ll post on the effectiveness and conversion of online advertising on social media and I’ll compare that with the total participation in UGC advertising to see if advertising in social media is a gold mine of missed opportunity or if it’s still a developing sector that should be watched closely.

Track my friendfeed to get updates.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Okay, so I’ve been working on testing a number of new services lately. FriendFeed is one that has not been out very long, but it is incredible! It’s a service that combines updates from many services you use online (right now, it pulls from 35 different services) including, Twitter, blogs, flickr, delicious, Google Reader, LinkedIn, YouTube, digg and more.

So for example, I bookmark 3 stories on delicious, it’ll display to those following my friendfeed that I bookmarked those articles and makes the links available to them. At the same time it will tell followers when you make a blog post, add a video to YouTube, post a status update to Twitter and it’ll post those items to your feed as well. Currently I use it to display my Twitter status updates, delicious bookmarks, new blog posts, and YouTube videos. You can see my friendfeed by clicking here .

It’s been described by many, including myself, as a firehose of information. And rightly so! With the incredible amount of updates that are posted from multiple sources a day it can seem that almost every minute you’re presented with new updates and links. In fact, I follow 10 different sources (mainly from tech bloggers) and my friendfeed seems to have new items every 3 minutes! This is great if you’re following someone on Twitter who updates often, but it can be too much for those that occasionally follow someone using any of these services.

In addition to the friendfeed website, you can also download an app called "Alert Thingy " (I know, couldn’t they have thought of a better name?) to display your friendfeed updates on your desktop. For me this application is constantly updating, which I love and it keeps me from having to go back to the friendfeed website for my updates.

Of course, these two services are not for everybody, while it can improve your productivity on tracking updates from those you follow, it can also cause information overload (although because I follow a lot more tech blogs, I tend to get a lot more information than most), but if you are looking to simplify the process of tracking blog posts and twitter updates, it can really help!

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Facebook messaged all the fans of their upcoming release of the new Facebook profile designs with helpful information on viral marketing. It’s a good read. Much of it is basic, but it can help you understand the basics of viral marketing using Facebook.


Facebook Insider’s Guide to Viral Marketing - Get more documents

Yesterday SixApart, the creators of the popular TypePad blogging system released a Facebook application called BlogIt that allows you to blog simple posts and have the post published to your blog, whether it be through TypePad, Wordpress, Blogger, Movable Type and more and have the title of the post added to Twitter, Pownce, and Facebook as a status update.

The purpose of the application is to enable the author the ability to share posted items quickly and to streamline the sharing process.

You can get more information by clicking here .

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Nick O’Neill added an excellent post to his blog today on the different personalities of Facebook users. The author, Brandon Rennels is a pure comedic genius and compiled this list after using Facebook for the past four years.

Here’s a link to the post. It’s a long one, but exceptionally funny and well thought out!

Which one matches you???

Me? I think I closest fit with the News Feed Neurotic:
“It’s as if your life was an RSS feed wired directly to their brain.”

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

I just ran across a post on Search Engine Watch that does a great job of highlighting the different types of social media content. Since there is a little confusion with most businesses and consumers as to what is really classified as “social media” here’s a quick reference.

Wikipedia probably defines the term “social media” the best:

Social media is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words and pictures. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and “building” of shared meaning, as people share their stories, and understandings.

See often we mistake social media as just one thing or concept when it is really a whole lot more. Social media mainly thrives on the social interaction between users. A few years ago the most widely adapted concept was to add a forum or a chat to a website to enable the communication between users, giving the user control over some of the content that was added to a website as well as facilitating the social interaction between users.

More recently social media has been embodied in “social networks” like Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, Orkut, LinkedIn and more. The idea of creating connections between friends, co-workers, colleagues and more creating what’s been called the social graph. Social media is those networks and more.

I say more because it seems that almost all new websites that have launched in the last two and a half years have had some form of social media. Delicious exists to allow “social bookmarking”: a website bookmark list that is public and accessible to consumers and tracks the general trends and popularity between new stories, websites, blog posts and more.

In fact, a major push behind Web 2.0 is the idea of social media. Web 2.0 embraces the concept that the internet has matured into something that can be utilized as a platform. Social media takes center stage in embracing this new era by enabling user generated content or UGC. User generated content puts the user in control of the content that appears on a website rather than just one or two webmasters. This is the principal concept behind many of today’s popular social media websites.

In general, here are the types of social media as defined by Search Engine Watch:

1. News Content - Time sensitive events and news stories. Through the proliferation of social bookmarking websites and RSS syndication technology, news stories are distributed, blogged, bookmarked and rated in a rapid pace. Businesses looking to track and monitor the daily flow of information that can affect marketing and online business can use a service like online reputation monitoring to help manage their reputation based on this information online.
2. Sensational/Entertainment Content - This includes things that are aimed at attracting attention to something online. This category is most like to include “viral marketing” - where an ordinary video, blog post, or story can be proliferate through many thousands of people in a very short amount of time. YouTube videos are a perfect illustration of this category. Often people will blog, email or forward a link to a YouTube video they find entertaining or interesting making the video popularity increase immensely in a short amount of time.
3. Resource/Educational Content -You noticed that I pulled something from Wikipedia. If you’ve done a Google search researching information in the past, you’ve most likely come across this website. Wikipedia exists to give the consumer the ability to create the authoritative content on a topic. This type of social media is a perfect example of user generated content and social media.

Social media can seem like a complex topic, but it’s more than likely that in the past you’ve engaged in some form of social media. Whether it be commenting on a blog or news article, asking a question or responding on a forum, creating a social network account, or even just creating an online account to share pictures with your family. It all is considered social media!

Online video has had explosive growth in just the last two years. Just think, two years ago, the major tv networks didn’t offer online viewing of their prime-time shows, lifecasting was scarcely a term (justin.tv wasn’t around to show us just how great live online broadcasting could be), if you wanted to broadcast video there wasn’t much selection in services and you still had to pay a hefty price for the bandwidth, even YouTube didn’t offer much in the way of advertising (of course that was before Google bought them, too).

So with this explosive growth has come the consumers that watch the videos, bookmark them, rate them, comment on them and much more. This has given rise to the newer use of advertising in these videos. But there’s quite a selection in ad formats with online video. Emarketer.com published a story just yesterday that helped to summarize the formats and make understanding the concept just a little easier. Here’s the link to the article and here’s a link to the IAB, who created the guidelines to which these formats follow.

The graphic below summarizes the various ad formats and placements:

Also, in an upcoming post, I’ll outline several online video platforms that have a variety of uses, the features, pros, cons and my general opinion based on my experience with the service. It’ll be a very informative post… stay tuned!!!

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

I’ve been behind when it comes to upgrading my Wordpress blogging platform. In fact, they just released their version 2.5 of their system and I was still on version 2.1.3. So, I made the leap and decided to upgrade.

For those of you who have not upgraded, it’s always a good idea to do so every now and then as the upgrade process is a great way to back up your blog files and database in case something happens down the road. Plus, they add new and exciting features into the newer versions that can easily simplify what you are doing.

The upgrade process was simple and I LOVE the new features. They integrated the "sidebar widgets" plugin into the system and a new plugin update system informing you of any software updates to WP plugins (although this may have already been in previous updates)

Also, the UI is dramatically enhanced. The posting process is a lot simpler with integrated functionality to add photos, video, audio and more to a post. And I am in love with the tagging system.

Here’s a few screenshots:

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite