Archive for February, 2008
What Numbers are Right?
I picked up a copy of the winter edition of Electronic Retailer Magazine and started looking at the social networking data that they provided. Imagine my confusion when I saw different numbers for US Social Networking AD Spending on two different pages.
Emarketer said that is expects that social network ad spending will rise to $2.7 billion in 2011. The growth by year was:
- 2006 - $350 million
- 2007 - $920 million
- 2008 - $1.565 billion
In the same article MAGNA Global was predicting that social networking spending will exceed $1 billion by 2008.
Filed under Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (0) : Feb 29th, 2008
What the Affiliate Summit Session on Social Media Should Have Contained
My post about the Social Media Strategies in Affiliate Marketing session at Affiliate Summit was not meant to ruffle feathers. It was just opinion of the session not meeting my expectations.
So what should the session have been about? Well the topic was “Social Media Strategies in Affiliate Marketing”. Obviously blogging is a large part of social media marketing so it makes sense that it be covered by the panel.
Filed under Social Media Optimization : Comments (4) : Feb 28th, 2008
Social Media Session at Affiliate Summit
The social media session at Affiliate Summit was probably the worst session I have ever attended at any conference. The panel:
- Sam Harrelson, VP of Business Development, OnCard Marketing (Moderator)
- Stephanie Agresta, Partner, The Conversation Group
- Chris Brogan, Vice President Strategy & Technology, CrossTechMedia
- Justine Ezarik, iJustine
- Tris Hussey, Training Manager, b5media
- Deborah Schultz, Principal/Chief Strategist, DeborahSchultz.com
strongly believed that social media marketing or social networking was simply blogging and twitter.
Filed under Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (11) : Feb 28th, 2008
Jason Calacanis Was Right
Jason Calacanis, as he is prone to do, gave an interesting and controversial keynote address at Affiliate Summit this week. Calacanis who owns the human search engine Mahola railed against the spam from affiliate marketers and how that spam sites are clogging up the search engine results pages.
While the majority of affiliate marketers were affronted by Calacanis’s comments I must say that I agreed with him on this. Some verticals like hotels, mortgages, insurances are awash with spammed sites and a search engine results are full of duplicate, thin, affiliate or MAFA (made for adsense) sites. It is a bad user experience and it will impact how the average user conducts searches.
Filed under Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (2) : Feb 27th, 2008
Is advertising on Facebook best suited to branding
I am out at Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas and I had an interesting conversation with Carsten Cumbrowski about advertising on social networks, specifically Facebook Carsten made argument that Facebook can be a very good site to advertise on from a branding perspective.
The king of branding is traditional media. When you advertise on traditional media like TV, radio or print, it is always difficult to tell how well the campaign performed from a conversion perspective. You can estimate that X number of people heard, watched or read your ad, but that is about all. Your advertising campaign builds brand awareness and share of mind, which ultimately leads to more sales, but it is very difficult to translate one specific ad to that sale.
Filed under Brand Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (4) : Feb 24th, 2008
Looking Towards Web 3.0
When someone talks about Web 2.0, they are usually referring to the current interactive phase of internet development, defined by blogging, social networking and “wiki” sites built with user-generated content.
But what is the next evolution? What is web 3.0? In an article in the Financial Times Dawn Bebe, managing director of the UK’s first social shopping site for women, Osoyou.com, ventures a guess that “The next evolution for the web is social networks that have a purpose - vertical social networks”
Filed under Brand Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (4) : Feb 20th, 2008
Thank You To Our Advertisers
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Filed under Social Media Optimization : Comments (0) : Feb 19th, 2008
What kind of social media marketer are you?
As the owner of a search marketing company I spend a lot of time thinking about, and talking to, people about online marketing. Whenever I talk to people within the industry about social media marketing, it becomes apparent quite quickly what aspect of social media that they focus on.
Social media marketers fall into four camps; Linkers, Traffickers, Bloggers, or Explorers. Each camp takes a different approach to social media marketing. Which camp do you belong to?
Filed under Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (3) : Feb 19th, 2008
Will ads drive users away from social networks?
Earlier this week I wrote about how Forrester was recommending to their clients that they advertise on social networks because the cost is cheap, relative to other advertising opportunities. So it was pretty timely of BusinessWeek to have a article about how many users are spending less time on socal networking sites because they are annoyed with the ad deluge.
From the BusinessWeek article:
Filed under Brand Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (5) : Feb 14th, 2008
Forrester is advising clients to advertise on social networks
E-consultancy had an interesting post about Forrester Research who are advising clients that a recession is the time to be advertising on social networks. As Forrester put it:
Social applications in particular, such as communities and social networking sites, are cost-effective and have a measurable impact on prospects’ decisions in the consideration stage, which will be important to companies under recessionary pressures.
This is an interesting position for Forrester to take as social networks have not exactly been a boon for most advertisers. In their paper Forrester makes two points why this is a good time to switch your advertising dollars to social networks. The first point is:
Filed under Brand Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (3) : Feb 12th, 2008
