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.

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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!

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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 .

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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.”

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Interesting…

ComScore released numbers today on the top Ad Networks online. They found that in March, AOL was the top network reaching 9 out of 10 consumers online or 90.7%. Yahoo came in a close second with 85.3% and Google in third 80.9%. The AOL numbers also include Advertising.com.

Maybe I missed it, but where is Microsoft in all this? I don’t see adCenter in these numbers.

Also, this is interesting in light of AOL and Yahoo talking recently. We’ll see what happens with this one!

Updated: Center Networks is reporting that AOL announced today that they’ll also be managing the mobile and online ads for Verizon.

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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!

I just ran across this shot my wonderful wife got of me on Easter. I love it so much, I think it might just be my new headshot!! By the way, if you need a new headshot for business, resume, etc, give Erin Hession a call. She does amazing work!

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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!!!

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It was hypothesized not long ago that Yahoo would either have to accept and acquisition offer from Microsoft or embrace Google’s ad network to stay afloat and profitable. Last week, Yahoo pass again on Microsoft’s offer sending a stern letter in response. Today, Yahoo announced that they’re going to embrace Google and are performing a small test of their Adsense platform fulfilling what many deemed as inevitable. The test, although significant, is only expected to last two weeks and only incorporate 3% of Yahoo’s market.

Microsoft was quick to issue a response to the news saying that that if Yahoo were to offer Google ads, it would consolidate 90% of the search advertising market in Google’s hands.

For those currently advertising in search, it would create a single point in which to advertise on both major search portals and their individual services (Yahoo is currently the leader in online email users) cutting down on the need to advertise using two ad networks. The potential downside is that it does limit those advertisers who want to work with ad networks outside of Google. I can see both sides of the coin. Honestly, it’s a difficult pill to swallow for Yahoo, but necessary.

What do you think?