Tag Archives: Bebo Inc.

About 1604 days ago Online Marketing

Online Advertising through Social Media

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Do your friends trust you? How about your virtual friends? Social media marketers not only want to know who you’re talking to about the latest episode of “Lost,” they want to know how you’re interacting with your friends on your social media sites. If you’re the type of person who consistently uploads, shares, rates, blogs, and, yes, whom your friends trust, you represent a valuable component for the social media advertiser. According to Forrester Research, 75 percent of Internet users use social media, but less than half actively participate and influence their communities. Monetizing social media has been a challenge, but Lotame, a New York-business intelligence network and iWidgets of San Francisco, have made inroads into this maze by targeting users when they’re in the right mindset. Advertisers used to think that social networks only appealed to college-age students, but now social media has a reach comparable to the portals, such as Yahoo and MSN, says James Kiernan, vice president of digital media and innovation at New York-based MediaVest Worldwide. “There was a tendency not to acknowledge the [social media] ads as much as traditional ads, but now Facebook and Lotame are making the ads more relevant. All advertisers should consider social media as part of their plans.” Lotame tries crowd control Lotame gathers research data for its advertising and publishing clients (Flixster, Photolog, and Bebo) through its Crowd Control platform. The platform builds anonymous profiles of users by their age, gender, zip code, along with their actions and interests on the social media site. In fact, Crowd Control detects whether a user’s mouse is idle or not by recording the time spent looking at the creative content on the screen. “We look at people, not pages and how they are acting, interacting and communicating on the sites,” says Andy Monfried, CEO of Lotame. “We are focused on giving results to our advertisers so they can formulate a plan.” For instance, Lotame could target women ages 21-35 who upload and share content on Flixster, a movie social networking site, and then sell that data to an advertiser who would place their ad on Flixster. For movies, word of mouth is very powerful and Flixster is able to drive interactions with people who are vocal and want to share their opinions. It is within these targeted interactions that advertisers can make the most impact. “Social media is huge, but it’s important to not look at it as an amorphous thing,” says Steve Polsky, president and chief operating officer of Flixster. “You need to get people in the right mindset and catch them when they’re interested in movies — that’s what we try to offer.” Lotame partners with consumer goods advertisers and knows to catch users after they’ve checked their inbox and are more passive and receptive to advertising. Says Monfried, “Historically, ads didn’t respect the user and included pop ups and pop unders. We’re driving incredible business for our advertisers and publishers since we’re looking at it differently from everyone else by creating the technology and the means to do so.” iWidget uses widgets to monetize content “It’s really really hard to come to a website nowadays because users are using social media and are waiting for their friends to post a link,” says Peter Yared, founder and CEO of iWidgets. “Instead of pushing a rock up a hill, you put it where the people are.”  iWidgets gets web publishers’ content on social networking sites and also uses video players to integrate targeted offers. In these video players, pre roll clips introduce offers and encourage fans to share these offers with their online friends. “Online advertising used to be very much like a billboard,” Yared says. “Now it’s much more engaging — your product has a core set of fans and they want to show off your products.” Successful social media advertisers know how to get users to recommend and talk up their product without ever talking down to their market. And they know about finding the right community of friends to spend their advertising dollars. Concerns about privacy With all of this raw data from social media users, it would be quite easy to invade the privacy of consumers. In fact, many Facebook users don’t like how the ads on their profile page advertise weight loss, colon cleanses, and diet remedies because they feel Facebook is lifting data from their profile to specifically target them. This is in a way true. In order for social media advertising to grow and gain the consumer’s trust, it has to protect identifiable information and keep the data anonymous. In fact, respect and trust are what keep the social media community intact since users rely on strangers’ recommendations. “Yes, you can deliver targeted advertising,” says Kiernan, “but acknowledge the fact there are controls to preserve consumer privacy.”

About 1604 days ago Blogging and Social Media

Online Advertising through Social Media

our beautiful site

Do your friends trust you? How about your virtual friends? Social media marketers not only want to know who you’re talking to about the latest episode of “Lost,” they want to know how you’re interacting with your friends on your social media sites. If you’re the type of person who consistently uploads, shares, rates, blogs, and, yes, whom your friends trust, you represent a valuable component for the social media advertiser. According to Forrester Research, 75 percent of Internet users use social media, but less than half actively participate and influence their communities. Monetizing social media has been a challenge, but Lotame, a New York-business intelligence network and iWidgets of San Francisco, have made inroads into this maze by targeting users when they’re in the right mindset. Advertisers used to think that social networks only appealed to college-age students, but now social media has a reach comparable to the portals, such as Yahoo and MSN, says James Kiernan, vice president of digital media and innovation at New York-based MediaVest Worldwide. “There was a tendency not to acknowledge the [social media] ads as much as traditional ads, but now Facebook and Lotame are making the ads more relevant. All advertisers should consider social media as part of their plans.” Lotame tries crowd control Lotame gathers research data for its advertising and publishing clients (Flixster, Photolog, and Bebo) through its Crowd Control platform. The platform builds anonymous profiles of users by their age, gender, zip code, along with their actions and interests on the social media site. In fact, Crowd Control detects whether a user’s mouse is idle or not by recording the time spent looking at the creative content on the screen. “We look at people, not pages and how they are acting, interacting and communicating on the sites,” says Andy Monfried, CEO of Lotame. “We are focused on giving results to our advertisers so they can formulate a plan.” For instance, Lotame could target women ages 21-35 who upload and share content on Flixster, a movie social networking site, and then sell that data to an advertiser who would place their ad on Flixster. For movies, word of mouth is very powerful and Flixster is able to drive interactions with people who are vocal and want to share their opinions. It is within these targeted interactions that advertisers can make the most impact. “Social media is huge, but it’s important to not look at it as an amorphous thing,” says Steve Polsky, president and chief operating officer of Flixster. “You need to get people in the right mindset and catch them when they’re interested in movies — that’s what we try to offer.” Lotame partners with consumer goods advertisers and knows to catch users after they’ve checked their inbox and are more passive and receptive to advertising. Says Monfried, “Historically, ads didn’t respect the user and included pop ups and pop unders. We’re driving incredible business for our advertisers and publishers since we’re looking at it differently from everyone else by creating the technology and the means to do so.” iWidget uses widgets to monetize content “It’s really really hard to come to a website nowadays because users are using social media and are waiting for their friends to post a link,” says Peter Yared, founder and CEO of iWidgets. “Instead of pushing a rock up a hill, you put it where the people are.”  iWidgets gets web publishers’ content on social networking sites and also uses video players to integrate targeted offers. In these video players, pre roll clips introduce offers and encourage fans to share these offers with their online friends. “Online advertising used to be very much like a billboard,” Yared says. “Now it’s much more engaging — your product has a core set of fans and they want to show off your products.” Successful social media advertisers know how to get users to recommend and talk up their product without ever talking down to their market. And they know about finding the right community of friends to spend their advertising dollars. Concerns about privacy With all of this raw data from social media users, it would be quite easy to invade the privacy of consumers. In fact, many Facebook users don’t like how the ads on their profile page advertise weight loss, colon cleanses, and diet remedies because they feel Facebook is lifting data from their profile to specifically target them. This is in a way true. In order for social media advertising to grow and gain the consumer’s trust, it has to protect identifiable information and keep the data anonymous. In fact, respect and trust are what keep the social media community intact since users rely on strangers’ recommendations. “Yes, you can deliver targeted advertising,” says Kiernan, “but acknowledge the fact there are controls to preserve consumer privacy.”

About 1788 days ago Blogging and Social Media

Turn Social Networks into Your Recruiter

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Jason Averbook flies around the country advising major corporations how to weave social networks and Web 2.0 tools into recruiting and other human-resources practices. So when Averbook needed to add staff to his 50-person HR industry consulting firm recently, he knew he had to practice what he preached. Instead of going through traditional channels, Averbook updated the “Status” section of his profiles on three social networking sites, Facebook, LinkedIn and Plaxo, to show he was “desperately” seeking new employees. It worked. He got 19 qualified candidates in two days, compared to the five that his Minneapolis-based firm, Knowledge Infusion, attracted through a job listing on their website over the past three months. “Based on interviews that are already happening I predict we’ll end up hiring some of them,” Averbook says. Like Knowledge Infusion, other small businesses are using social networks to recruit employees at all levels. Because networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo and Ning cost little or nothing to join, there’s no reason small and mid-sized businesses shouldn’t try them for recruiting purposes, according to recruiting industry sources. According to Averbook and others, the key is building up a large circle of co-workers, former co-workers, friends, industry associates, customers and “people you run into on airplanes” so when you do have a job opening, you can tap into a group that already knows you and your company, Averbook says. Another advantage of using social networks: showing candidates that even though you’re small, you can be as “bleeding edge” as a much larger enterprise, Averbook says. Recruiting efforts start on in-house networks At nGenera, a venture-backed Austin, Texas, company that makes a suite of Web-based business software, recruiting starts at home. The year-old business uses applicant-tracking software from Jobvite to broadcast information on job openings over its company intranet to 537 employees, half of whom work from home. Employees can use Jobvite to forward the information to any email address in their Microsoft Outlook address book — and earn a referral bonus if someone they know ends up taking the job. Katie Tierney, nGenera’s recruiting manager and a dedicated online networker, also uses Twitter, the combination micro-blogging and networking service, to announce when she has openings for software developers or other positions. She also uses Summize, a Twitter search engine, to comb through Twitter feeds for people talking about subjects related to jobs she’s trying to fill “and figure out if it’s someone I want to approach,” she says. nGenera maintains a fan page on Facebook and an nGenera group on LinkedIn. Because they don’t cost anything, it’s easy to experiment. Even when things haven’t worked out it’s led to publicity for the company, such as the time an nGenera recruiter auctioned off a potato chip with a burn mark in the shape of the state of Texas on eBay and donated the proceeds to Austin’s city parks. The stunt didn’t net any new recruiters, but it was a morale booster for existing employees, says Susie Buehler, nGenera’s chief people officer. “With more Gen Ys coming in, we hear from employees that it’s important to them that the company has a social conscious,” and if they’re happy they’ll tell their friends, Buehler says. Recruiters almost universally shun MySpace, the granddaddy of social networks, because the demographic — think high school kids and younger — isn’t what they’re looking for, and because “it’s too noisy,” audibly and visually, nGenera’s Tierney says. Tips and tricks Although Facebook and LinkedIn are the biggies, recruiters suggest that companies investigate niche social networks that have cropped up to serve specific professionals or regions of the country. Tierney belongs to two, RecruitingBlogs.com, and Minnesota Recruiters, which is part of Ning. Inc.com’s sister publication, Fast Company, now also operates a social network. Other recruiting suggestions: Be prepared to act quickly. According to Knowledge Infusion’s Averbook, A and B level talent are the mostly likely users of online social networks, and the most sought after candidates. “Whether you’re big or small, the faster you get to the A-grade talent the better off you are,” Averbook says. Think instant. Use instant messaging, texting, and other instant forms of communication, which resonate with Gen Y-age workers, says Pat Meehan, an executive recruiter in Evansville, Ind. “They respond much faster to these media as opposed to phone calls, e-mails or voice mail,” Meehan says. Finding leads is just the start. Make sure to go through your normal interview process, says Bob Lenthart, president of Derek Hart Ventures LLC, an Atlanta-area publishing company, who recruits through LinkedIn and ecademy, a business networking Website. Sidebar: Online Social Networks Here are some online social networks companies can use for recruiting purposes: Bebo – 40 million registered users Classmates.com – 50 million registered users Facebook – 80 million registered users Friendster – 65 million registered users LinkedIn – 22 million registered users Ning – Registered users not disclosed Plaxo – 15 million registered users

About 1879 days ago Online Marketing

The New Advertising Medium: Social Media

A recent piece in  the Economist raises a provocative question: social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo have grown tremendously in usage, but are they viable businesses? In other words, is it possible to monetize these services in an effective fashion? To answer this question, it helps to take a step back and look at the monetizability of social media as a whole. Since most social media sites rely on advertising revenues, let us restrict ourselves to advertising as the monetization mechanism. Regardless of the ad model used –cost per impression (CPM), cost per click (CPC), or cost per action (CPA) — advertisers value three key measures: reach, frequency, and targeting. Many social media sites certainly score high on reach and frequency, but how do they fare on targeting? Targeting is key, because it determines the CPM rates advertisers are willing to pay. And CPM rates vary very widely: from $16-20 for TripAdvisor to $0.10 for Facebook and MySpace. What drives such a wide divergence in CPM rates among social media sites? Are the low rates at social networking sites a transient aberration, with higher rates around the corner? Is there a simple model to predict the targetability of different forms of social media? Remarkably, there appears to be a single factor that explains a great deal of the available data. Consider the difference between a Facebook profile and a TripAdvisor travel review. A typical pageview on the former is by someone known very well to the creator of the profile — a close friend or acquaintance. On the other hand, a TripAdvisor travel review is seen by people completely unrelated in any way to the person or persons who wrote the reviews on the page. We quantify this distinction with a measure called “affinity.” The affinity of a social media service is the average closeness of relationship between a content creator and someone who views that content.  The affinity of Facebook is very high, while the affinity of TripAdvisor is very low. Now for the key observation: There is an inverse relationship between the affinity of a social media service and its targetability. Why is this true? The act of viewing a Facebook profile gives us very little information about the viewer, other than the fact that she is friends with the profile creator; when someone views a TripAdvisor travel review, she is definitely interested in traveling to that location. There is a strong inverse proportionality between the affinity and the targetability for several forms of social media, with a couple of outliers. We’ll get to the outliers in a moment; for now, note that social networks and photo-sharing sites have even higher affinity (and therefore lower targetability) than e-mail. This is because we often e-mail people we don’t know or know only in passing. Instant messaging (IM) has the very highest of affinities: my IM buddy list includes only my very closest friends, who I trust with the ability to interrupt me any time of the day.  (See graphic at my blog.) What about the outliers? Video sharing sites, such as YouTube, have low affinity, because the majority of people see videos posted by people they don’t know. However, the targetability is lower than we would expect, because of a compensating factor: herding. Most people see videos featured on lists such as “Most Popular,” which reduces the targeting value of such videos. This is also true of social news sites, such as Slashdot and Digg. A  couple of caveats: This is a broad brush-stroke, and individual services might well differ from the overall category. For example, popular blogs have much lower affinity and therefore much higher CPMs than the typical blog. Targetability is not the only factor determining CPM; there are others. For example, certain viewer intents are inherently more valuable than others. But with these caveats, this simple model is highly instructive. We may conclude that the CPM rates of IM services will not exceed those of social networks, which will not exceed those of e-mail. These are inherently low CPM businesses. What can social media sites do to increase their CPMs? There appear to be two options: Create sections of the network that are more topic-oriented, and less about individuals. For example, band pages and groups on MySpace, and Facebook groups. Mine individuals’ profiles, or their off-site behaviors, to target them behaviorally rather than contextually. This approach carries with it dangers of privacy violations, as the Facebook Beacon fiasco demonstrates. If social networks are to become a viable business, and therefore a viable advertising medium for businesses, particularly small and mid-sized companies, they need to aggressively pursue one or both of these approaches. Of course, it may be possible for some services to sidestep this question entirely and develop business models that don’t depend on advertising. We haven’t seen such a model emerge yet, but there is so much creativity and ferment in this space that it might just happen. Anand Rajaraman is co-founder of the search engine Kosmix. He also sits on the board of several technology companies and currently teaches at the Computer Science department of Stanford University.