5 posts tagged “online advertising”

Viral_social marketing

The latest special print issue of MIT's Technology Review has an article on visualizing "Better Friends" by Erica Naone. Apart from the visuals of the blogosphere, Twitter and others, the one that caught my eye was the visual on viral marketing - something very relevant and dear to me.

Furthermore, being deep into social media, networks and user-generated content -  the last line of the paragraph below hit home for me. I used to listen and learn from many top social networkers/producers until I noticed that I started shutting myself out with many - they have lost their influence with me. They are all the time selling products and services with the sole cause of their own popularity. They do not evangelize - they sell. Popularity is their focus - not their collateral success. One erodes the social equity built over time and involvement. Many have have many friends today online but then there is a social connection/equity even with your audience/readers/followers - the mind is fickle with all the noise and the "new new things" and "new new people" coming out everyday.

The web is becoming social - from a network of servers and pages, its becoming a network of people. We are the carriers - we consume from each other (not just reporters), we produce and we distribute.

The full article is here and the piece on viral marketing from the article below:

Viral_social marketing1

"Several years ago, a large retailer tried to encourage word-of-mouth marketing for products sold on its site byoffering incentives to site visitors who made product recommendations. Many companies are trying to use people's social connections for such "viral marketing" programs, hoping that information about products (and the urge to buy them) can spread through a network of people the way a virus might. But after studying more than 15 million recommendations generated by the retailer's incentive program, a team made up of Jure Leskovec, Lada Adamic, and Bernardo Huberman, director of the information dynamics lab at Hewlett-Packard, was skeptical. Huberman and his colleagues looked at the networks that grew up around each product--who bought and recommended it, and who responded to the recommendation--and saw that they took on different characteristics depending on the type of product. A network around a medical book (top image below), where red dots and lines indicate people who purchased the book while blue dots and lines represent people who received a recommendation, shows a scattered network where recommendations, on average, don't travel very far. The network surrounding a Japanese graphic novel (bottom image below), on the other hand, shows a thick flow of information among densely connected people. The researchers found that viral marketing was most effective for expensive products recommended within a small, tightly connected group. They also found that overusing consumers' social connections for marketing can make them less influential."

There is a really neat article in the new issue of The Economist here about social networks, the walls around them and how they are utilities hard to monetize - like webmails. Since a picture is worth a 1000 words, I thought the one below was very contextual and would say it all.

It is of course possible, that it is a recommendation engine of products - ones that I might need in the future since they have a lot of profile information about my life with startups.

Imagine: Startups can be a hairy ride

Well - I couldn't think of a better way to test how relevant TechMeme "is" or should I say the relevance of Techmeme.
This post has nothing to do with technology so here is some important trivia on it:

• Is is the third-person singular verb form of the copula in the English language [Source:Wikipedia]
• A search on Google for 'is' gives 4,450,000,000 results
• Is is country code top level domain name for Iceland

Imagine: iSocial instead Social Ads [John/Steve - you cool?]

I usually don't like to blog about technology since I live and breath it. Furthermore, I prefer the more complex creature that uses it - people. Once in a while, I am tempted so here goes:

There are tons of different views on how Facebook should monetize their traffic - something that obviously needs a lot of improvement. Facebook Ads launched recently and if there is one thing in common to all of the various options - it was NewsFeeds. Sponsored Pages, Beacon, Social Ads - all of them tie into the NewsFeed.

Competing against Google with search was recently thrown out there by VentureBeat as a revenue stream but it does not make sense to me and here is why:

1. Search is not in the page views business and is "open" - it sends user to other sites. Social networks are in the page views business and hence they are closed
2. Facebook lives that - even messages (except for mobile) need to read by coming to the site
3. Search is a different beast all together
   

The DNA, imho, of both businesses are very different.

Search bring intent inherently in the act whereas most social networks today bring curiosity (unless it is a business network like LinkedIn). It can potentially bring intent to the party by tapping into the offline social behavior of seeking referrals or recommendations.

If 99.8% of stories that all Facebook users publish are not seen, I would think  Facebook could turbo charge curiosity and enhance their referrals (to Quote Mark Zuckerberg: "“People influence people. Nothing influences people more than are recommendation from a trusted friend. A trusted referral influences people more than the best broadcast message. A trusted referral is the Holy Grail of advertising.") by bringing search to its NewsFeeds. Currently they have a limited 'push' element to it but nothing to 'pull'. They definitely have the content. If that is done, there is far more context for their ads on the system.

When you want to achieve/ acquire or research something where do you start - maybe by asking/ searching for people (who you know) who have experienced that in the past?

Focusing on one's core competency, users and their behavior always helps.

Imagine: Seeing relevant ads from Amazon or Orbitz while searching for someone who has read a book (or bought one that Beacon can tell me about) or has traveled to Paris (information available through apps)

Update - it is ironic that now you can [Ad]Friends

With Facebook just launching their new ad program of Beacon, Insight and Social Ads - you have more choices now.
If Gordon Gekko's Social Graph is not a good strategy for you, how about adding them as friends and getting more Insight? Aw - Aren't they cute.

Beacon seems like 'Share' available today on any New York Times article or other sites etc and Insight seems to be like MySpace brand pages (here is one for Cherry Coke) with metrics but I am sure there is something that I don't know ......