Make Money Online

Maybe you were one of the 100 million who watched the underdog New Orleans Saints win the Super Bowl, but here’s something you didn’t see: an ad from Pepsi, noticeably absent among Super Bowl advertisers for the first time in 23 years. Ironically, unlike Google, the soft drink giant decided to bow out of the big game and put $20 million into digital media instead, relying on its own website and Facebook to tout its brand. Go to Pepsi.com and you’ll see just how digitally sophisticated Pepsi has become.

Don’t underestimate the importance of Pepsi’s promotional strategy. It is representative of what other advertisers are considering this year. Previously, I reported that Procter & Gamble is ramping up its Facebook presence.

It has taken the big guys a while to catch on to social media, but it looks like the floodgates have finally opened. PepsiCo North America’s Marketing VP, Ralph Santana, sounded like a social media convert when he told Financial Times, “We’re living in a new age with consumers. They are looking for more of a two-way dialogue, story-telling and word of mouth. Mediums like the digital space are much more conducive towards that.”

Facebook clearly recognizes that it is on the leading edge of the digital advertising revolution. The company is working with media researcher Nielsen, renowned for television’s Nielsen Ratings, to measure Facebook’s advertising effectiveness.

According to Financial Times, ad agencies are excited about Facebook’s promotional potential, too. Rich Gagnon, chief media officer at Draft FCB, sees Facebook as an important media outlet with the ability to reach more than 350 million people in one place. Even better, Gagnon says, Facebook can provide targeting capabilities based on demographics and interests.

The most exciting potential for advertisers using Facebook, however, may actually be Facebook Connect, which was introduced in late 2008. At last report, Facebook Connect was available on more than 15,000 websites. This set of APIs lets users “bring their identity and connections everywhere,” says Facebook.

Facebook Connect can do things like enable its users to share an advertiser’s website content with their friends, who then click back to the advertiser’s site. Tools like Facebook Connect represent a way social media can be seamlessly integrated with everything from websites to mobile devices.

Jesse Pickard, a social media specialist at digital agency Razorfish, blogged about Facebook Connect a year ago. What he had to say then has a lot of relevance to advertisers today:

“With a one-click login to Facebook Connect, websites have access to an unprecedented amount of user data. Using this data, sites now have the ability to redefine the way they display user generated content.”

“Although Facebook Connect isn’t an advertising buy, it can accomplish the same goals as one (and in an unintrusive manner).  Brands can get their content into Facebook’s viral channels by letting visitors post news feed stories, status messages, photos, events, and more without leaving the website.”

Of course, advertisers have a variety of social media options available to them in addition to Facebook. Similar tools to Facebook Connect also exist, such as Google’s Friend Connect and MySpaceID.

All of this bodes well for online marketing. Big advertisers are legitimizing social media by finally including Facebook in their strategic marketing plans. They are realizing that the opportunities to make use of sophisticated social media have never been better.

Maybe for his haircut to have been truly prohetic Tracy Porter should have added Facebook.

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Who Dat? Not Pepsi

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• how much money do you make at pepsi

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Purveyors of malware and BlackHat SEO’s have been pulling in a great deal of headlines lately. It seems anytime something makes the news, there is a report of illegitimate web sites targeting keywords associated with the story to draw visitors into their malicious site. Earlier this month, I discussed how search poisoning is used to push malicious sites to the top of the SERPs. I figured a nice follow up to this would be a description of what the attacker does once he or she gets you to their site.

Drive-by downloads
The purpose of the search poisoning is usually to drive unsuspecting visitors to a malicious web site where the visitor’s computer downloads malware to their computer without their consent or knowledge.

A drive-by download , or drive-by installation, works by exploiting security vulnerabilities on the browser used to surf the Internet. A malicious web site is set up containing code that actively seeks out these vulnerabilities. When found, they send the visitor to a third-party server where the malware is silently installed on their computer.

Why the third-party server? Even attackers work hard to achieve these high page rankings, albeit through less than ethical techniques. Sending visitors to a third-party server means their ranked page can survive longer since it is not flagged as housing malware.

Examples
In the month of January, four headlines drew a large amount of interest from attackers. The rumors of actor Johnny Depp’s death, actress Brittany Murphy’s death, the earthquake in Haiti and the release of the Apple iPad all found themselves to be targets of a combined SEO poisoning/drive-by download attack.

In each case, the victim downloaded malware to their computer known as “scareware”. Scareware is used to frighten the victim into believing that their computer is infected with malware. In a panic, the victim purchases the advertised security software to clean their system. Selling bogus security software to their victims has been bringing attackers in around 15 million dollars a month. Not hard to believe when you consider that Consumer Reports estimates that 1 in 90 people fall for these scams.

While scareware is the malware du jour, it is not the only method of attack. Some sites install even less conspicuous malware onto their victims’ computers. Using Trojans, attackers can steal passwords, account information or create large botnets of zombie computers that they use to attack web sites, attack networks and spread spam. A prime example of this was when the Stadium for the Miami Dolphin’s web site was injected with a malicious code attacking those looking for Super Bowl information.

More to come
Just next month, the Winter Olympic games kick off and this summer, the World Cup will be in full swing. Security experts are already predicting these to be included in the next round of malicious keywords.

Protecting yourself from drive-by downloads can be tricky. It would be easy to suggest that people only visit well-known web sites, but that is counter-productive to the web. After all, what makes the web so great is the ability to find new and interesting sites.

Tools can be used to help identify sites that could be potentially dangerous. McAfee has introduced SiteAdvisor and Symantec has Norton Safe Web, but unless someone else has been infected by the site it does little to protect you.

The best solution to any malware is to run a legitimate anti-malware , or anti-virus for those stuck in the 1990’s, software on your computer that is updated frequently. Staying proactive is the only way to keep infectious files at bay.

The rest is here:
Drive-by Downloads on the Rise

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Recently The Virginia Senate has proposed Bill no. 660. Effectively, the same Advertising Tax that was passed and done significant damage to the small entrepreneurial internet marketing businesses in those states and cost small business jobs in the process.

States have started looking at these bills as a way to make money for their states in times of economic and budgetary turmoil. In California, arguably the State with the most financial troubles, Governor Schwarzenegger understood the effect that this bill would have on the entrepreneurs and jobs in his state and vetoed the bill.

Last night Governor Bob McDonnell delivered the GOP response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address. The full video of his response is below, but I wanted to call attention to some of his words in that response that clearly shows that he must follow Governor Schwarzenegger’s example and veto Bill 660, if it make it to his desk. He said the following:

“Here in Virginia we face our highest unemployment rate in 25 years, and bringing new jobs and more opportunities to our citizens is the top priority of my administration. Good Government policies should spur economic growth and strengthen the private sectors ability to create new jobs.”

And then Governor McDonnell followed that with the following at 1:49 in the video below and aired throughout most of the morning news broadcasts this morning:

“We must enact policies that promote entrepreneurship and innovation so America can better compete with the world. What government should not do is pile on more taxation, regulation, and litigation that kills jobs and hurt the middle class.”

Virginia Senate Bill 660 is a policy that will discourage entrepreneurship in Virginia. If enacted, the innovative entrepreneurs in the state will be dropped by the same merchants that the state hopes to obtain taxes from and the potential tax gains will be more than offset by the loss of revenue from these entrepreneural businesses and the employees they are forced to fire.

There are many Internet marketing and advertising companies in Virgina that earn their living through Internet advertising. They do not sell merchant products, nor do they even know who their customers are. These businesses earn revenue through advertising for out-of-state merchants. Upwards of 90% or more of their revenue comes from out-of-state merchants. Large advertisers like Overstock and Amazon have already put Virginia affiliates on notice, that if this bill progresses they will stop working with these entrepreneurial companies in Virginia, like they have in EVERY state that this Internet Advertising tax has been proposed. Those large advertisers are just the tip of the iceberg, many merchants will stop working with these entrepreneurial companies in Virginia, because we have seen it happen in New York and every other state where this Advertising Tax has been passed.

Please Governor McDonnell, we hope that you will help us insure that this bill never reaches your desk, but if it does, please Veto it. Don’t allow Virginia to enact a policy that squashes entrepreneurship and innovation in your state by piling on more taxation that will kill jobs and hurt the middle class of Virginia.

Respectfully yours,

Adam Viener
Chariman & Founder
Imwave, Inc.
Reston, VA

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Governor McDonnell’s GOP Response to Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address Jan 27th, 2010:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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When the Federal Trade Commission’s new blogger disclosure rules went into effect on Dec. 1, bloggers were not just faced with ethical exposure, they were also faced with a Web design dilemma.

With the FTC wanting to know the relationships between the writers and the products they write about, the question becomes how and where bloggers should display the information on their sites.

Because of the archival nature of the Web, every post about any product is just a Google search away, so it’s unrealistic for the FTC to expect bloggers to go back and retroactively disclose relationships on past posts. Instead, most bloggers have decided on a separate page with a list of their relationships with businesses.

Chris Brogan, the well-known blogger and social media consultant, has done just that with brief mentions of his disclosures on his site’s About page. Read it here.

Included on that list are Brogan’s affiliate relationships as well as products he has received for review.

In contrast, author Tim Ferriss is much briefer on his disclosure page, linking out to a bio of his investments. Read it here.

After Dec. 1, other bloggers decided to weave their disclosures into individual blog entries and leave it at that. Implementation of the disclosures has been inconsistent and will be even more so as social media endorsements start to gain more and more focus. How do you disclose a positive Tweet in 140 characters or less?

Bloggers need to consider what works for them best. Having these disclosures on a FAQ page seems convenient but could also become out-of-sight, out-of-mind.  For the sticklers at the FTC, top-of-mind is what’s going to quickly become the name of the game.

The rest is here:
FTC Makes Bloggers Ponder How to Disclose

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As the New Year approaches, you might be reflecting on how you spent your marketing budget in 2009, and what you might change in 2010. Chances are you’ve spent some of it with Google Adwords, and maybe even Yahoo! Search Marketing and/or Microsoft AdCenter. After all, search marking is a critical first step of online ad buys. But with only  5% of pages views on the web come from search, there is likely some room to get a better ROI by diversifying your online ad strategy.

There are three incentives for running campaigns on a variety of networks:

• First, you can reach new audiences, which means better targeting.
• Second, running on many networks can offer lower costs-per-conversion because campaigns can be targeted on more of a niche-basis.
• Finally, you can get more out of each ad dollar spent because running campaigns cross several networks lets you determine which messages perform best with which audience. This allows you to optimize your campaigns on a network-by-network basis.

In a nutshell, advertisers should  look at  other ways of approaching ad buys in 2010: via social media and niche-based networks. Depending on your business model, either one (or both) of these approaches can represent a wealth of untapped traffic and new customers.

5 Social Media Ad Networks

The real value social networks offer advertisers is the ability to precisely target ads. You see, when users use social networks, they provide a wealth of data about themselves — their interests, demographics, etc. As an advertiser, you can tap into this data to set-up campaigns and target users in a variety of ways. Here’s an overview of five of the more well-known social media ad networks; each offers dynamic ways to buy advertising and acquire potential customers.

Facebook Ads: By advertising through Facebook Ads, you can target users with a variety of criteria, including age, location, gender, and education, as well as with targeted keywords. Facebook Ads are mostly text-based and have a maximum limit of 135 characters, but you can also include a small image. You also have a choice between buying ads either on a CPM or CPC basis.

StumbleUpon Ads: Through StumbleUpon, you can target a pre-determined number of users according to their interests, as well as other criteria such as location, gender, and age. StumbleUpon lets users discover new content/websites based on their preferences. Users hit a “stumble” button and are shown sites at random that fit those preferences, the user then gives the as  a thumbs-up or -down, and an algorithm tries to figure out their personal taste. When advertising through StumbleUpon, however, you want to ensure that your landing page is appropriate for the audience you’re targeting. If it’s not, enough users might vote it down that you won’t get your money’s worth in “stumbles.” To help you along  StumbleUpon provides metrics on how many users like/dislike your landing page, and provides  you with user reviews of your landing page. This lets you adjust your campaigns to suit the StumbleUpon user base you are trying to target.

LinkedIn Direct Ads: For targeting business professionals few ad networks offer the quality or database that LinkedIn does. Through LinkedIn Direct Ads, you can reach a worldwide audience of over 50 million professionals and target them according to location, industry, job title, and company size. Ads are also available on either a CPC or CPM basis. You should be aware, though, that this isn’t the most affordable network. For example, CPMs in some ad categories can reach $50 or higher, and although rich media placements are available, they are restricted to advertisers with budgets of $25,000 and up.

MySpace MyAds: Through MySpace MyAds you can “hyper-target” MySpace users with banners ads on either a CPC or a CPM basis. Hyper-targeting means that you use criteria such as gender, age, location, education, interests, hobbies, and parental status. Also, since MySpace MyAds is part of the FOX Audience Network, you can take your campaigns beyond MySpace and reach out to users on other Fox-owned content sites.

Sponzai: This is the latest network from Izea,, a social media marketing company. Sponzai is a bit different than  traditional media buying networks in that it lets you proactively connect with a blogger’s audience by posting guest posts on their sites. Essentially, you write a potential guest post, upload it to the system, and indicate how much you’re willing to pay to have it featured on a targeted blog. Then bloggers review your content and price, and make a decision whether or not to place your post. The interesting thing about Sponzai is that you don’t only get eyeballs, but the ability to actually interact with someone’s audience and contextual backlinks.

5 Alternative PPC Ad Networks

When diversifying your online ad campaigns, you don’t necessarily have to go into completely new territory. You can also stick to conventional ad-buying models/networks.. There are a number of these traditional, auction-based ad networks that let you buy ad real-estate in a more conventional way — i.e. on a variety of content sites that belong to the networks as publishers. Some of them can even help you target users on high profiles sites that just aren’t available through Google, Yahoo, or Bing.

Ask Sponsored Listings: Although this search engine isn’t as big as Google or “BingHoo,” it’s focused on specific verticals, making it an opportune network for certain advertisers. It also features publishers such as Excite, Mamma, and Dogpile, not to mention other lifestyle and technology sites, such as CNET.com. Just like on it’s larger, search engine counterparts,  here advertisers bid on ad placements via a CPC model. Ask Sponsored Listings claims a reach of over 70 million unique users.

AOL Advertising: Acquired by AOL over two years ago, this ad network was formerly known as Quigo AdSonar. On it, advertising is sold on a contextual basis, and advertisers bid on a placement through a CPC model. Rich media placements are also available, and AOL’s sponsored listings let advertisers reach users through sites such as ABC.com, CNN Money, The Washington Post, AOL Money and Finance, and FOX News.

Marchex Adhere: (aka IndustryBrains) Through Marchex Adhere, you can buy ads on either a call- or click-basis. The verticals you can bid on include business, finance, real estate, IT, and HR. You can also buy site-specific placements with publishers like BusinessWeek, PC World, The Globe and Mail, and Kiplinger.com. Although the familiarity of their keyword-targeted placements might appeal to you more, Marchex’s real strength is in their site-specific targeting.

Pontiflex: This is more of a Cost Per Lead (CPL) marketplace than an ad network. While there isn’t a roster of publishers per se, Pontiflex offers a technology that lets you access the entire CPL marketplace. This technology can even help you manage non-Pontiflex campaigns. The Pontiflex CPL network is available through the AdLeads and AdUnitX platforms, and some of publishers using the technology include such notable sites as Pandora, Monster, and Admob.

MIVA: (aka Findwhat) Acquired by the performance-based advertising network Adknowledge in March 2009, MIVA was once known as e-Spotting and FindWhat. Their Precision Network is intended for targeting specific verticals, and MIVA also has a network of thousands of sites available for sponsored placements. Without setting up an account as an advertiser, however, it’s difficult to get information on the specific sites and publishers in their network.

Before the Leap of Faith

Search marketing is an important first step in online advertising because it can deliver the volume you need to determine your average cost per conversion. Without that data, you can neither  determine whether a network is worth advertising with, nor  calculate how much to invest in such a campaign.

If you’re running big campaigns, automated tools like Shoemoney Tools or, on the enterprise level, SEM software like Acquisio SEARCH can help get the most out of the primary PPC channels. They both offer PPC bid management tools that are good for managing the keywords of many campaigns.

Then, you have to make sure that a network’s pricing model fits with your business model. Ad models can range for from CPC to CPM to CPA, and you need to decide in advance which are most appropriate for your goals. Finally, test a few small campaigns before fully launching a campaign across a new channel. This will help you both measure the value of the traffic and optimize your campaigns around that traffic before you go all out.

Auld Lang Syne

Because of the weakened economy and how user behavior has evolved over the last two years, online advertisers should consider diversifying their media buys in 2010. Not only will it better insulate them from sudden shifts in the market, but it will let them target campaigns with much more accuracy and  see greater returns.

Advertisers need to look for criteria identifying their users beyond a mere search term. They can find this through either niche-based networks or social networks. While social networks let you target users according to a variety of strong interests, niche-based networks help you reach users on the basis of one strong interest.. Either way, advertisers should be exploring ways to dynamically target users even when they’re not actively looking for your products and services.

Excerpt from:
10 Places to Diversify Your Online Ad Budget in 2010

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It’s rare that one day of shopping has the ability to impact Wall Street but financial forecasters are focused on this year’s Black Friday’s numbers as a gauge of how close to recovery our economy really is.  That $10.66 billion dollars in estimated retail sales only represents a scant 0.5% growth is a worrying sign.  Thankfully, online sales are the highlight.

According to Reuters and ShopperTrak, this year’s Black Friday sales underperformed.  Comparatively, in 2008, sales increased 3% year-over-year during a holiday season at the apex of one of the worst financial climates in US history. This makes this year’s 0.5 % growth year-over-year worrisome.

Consumers said they were planning to spend nearly 8% less on average, or about $343 per person, over the Thanksgiving Weekend, according to the National Retail Federation (NRF).

Surprisingly department stores trumped discount retailers with 49.4% of shoppers visiting at least one. Discount retailers reached 43.2% of holiday shoppers with outlet stores grabbing 7.8%.

“In an economy like this one, every retailer wants to be a discounter,” said Tracy Mullin, NRF President and CEO. “Department stores have done an admirable job touting both low prices and good quality, which are important requirements for holiday shoppers on a budget.”

Online fared much better with a healthy $595 million dollars in estimated retail sales, according to comScore, which represents an 11 % increase year over year.

2009 Holiday Season To Date vs. Corresponding Days* in 2008 Non-Travel (Retail) Spending Excludes Auctions and Large Corporate Purchases Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations Source: comScore, Inc. *Based on corresponding shopping days (November 2-28, 2008).
	Millions ($)
	2008	2009	Percent Change
November 1 – 27	$10,254	$10.570	3%
Thanksgiving Day (Nov. 26)	$288	$318	10%
Black Friday (Nov. 27)	$534	$595	11%

According to the NRF, over one-fourth of Americans shopping during the Thanksgiving Weekend (28.5%) were shopping online. There was little surprise in the online leaders with Amazon, Wal-Mart, Apple, Target, and Best Buy representing the top 5 most visited retail sites.

“Black Friday, better known as a shopping bonanza in brick-and-mortar retail stores, is increasingly becoming one of the landmark days in the online holiday shopping world,” said comScore chairman, Gian Fulgoni. “The $595 million in online spending this Black Friday represents the second heaviest online spending day of the season-to-date and a double-digit increase from last year.”

The relative strength of online sales supports data from Compete which forecasts a 14% increase in consumers who will  spend at least some of their holiday budget online this year. At the start of the year advertising and sales online were down overall. The success of online sales  indicates that advertisers who invested their budget online and drove the growth in online advertising during Q3 of 2009, as reported by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers, certainly got their money’s worth.

For online retailers the big question is whether tomorrow’s Cyber Monday totals will be equally positive. For traditional retailers the question is whether shoppers, burdened in an economy with an unemployment rate above 10%, will continue to spend throughout the holiday season.

Read more:
Online Sales Bright Spot in Lackluster Black Friday

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If the Federal Trade Commission had the intention to spark off a wave of sometimes worried, sometimes angry and often indignant blog posts and forum chatter with their “Final Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising”, they’ve certainly succeeded.

About a week ago, ReveNews contributor Andrew M. Baer, Esq, wrote “FTC Regulates Blogger, Viral Marketing Relationships: Analysis and compliance tips” stating why he’s not concerned about the FTC intentions.

The guides which come into force on 1st December, are aimed at addressing endorsements by consumers, experts, organizations, and celebrities, with the intention of holding bloggers or other “word of mouth” marketers accountable, with the enforcement mechanism of a possible $11,000 fine.

As short-sighted and ambiguous as some bloggers have painted the guides to be, many bloggers’  objections have been equal in the fear, uncertainty, and doubt camp as they accuse their detractors. Many blogs painting worst-case scenarios and posting what-if scenarios with $11,000 fines for receiving cheap paperbacks as a freebie in the mail, writing a positive review and linking it to an Amazon affiliate link.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), which comprises more than 375 leading media and technology companies is responsible for selling 86% of online advertising in the United States and includes organizations like:
* AOL Advertising
* AT&T Internet Services
* BBC Worldwide
* Google Inc
* Microsoft Advertising
* Yahoo! Inc
* Sony Computer Entertainment America, Inc
* Harvard Business Review
* CNN.com
* FOX Interactive Media
* Nokia Inc

and other technology/internet/news heavyweights in its membership roster. IAB has come out swinging off the ropes with IAB CEO Randall Rothenberg firing off an open letter to FTC chairman, Jon Leibowitz, published on the IAB website and the Huffington Post, expressing his disagreement with the guides on the basis that they are unconstitutional and should be retracted.

In case you’re wondering if the IAB is shooting from the hip, take note that the organization has attempted to start a dialogue with the FTC since March this year, with correspondence detailing(pdf) feedback on the proposed guides. The attempt to have the industry self-regulate appears to have failed, given that the FTC has expressed its intention to keep an eye and active hand in the industry.

In a FTC arranged media call on 14th October to address reporter’s inquiries on the guides, FTC’s Bureau Consumer Protection’s Associate Director for Advertising Practices, Mary Engle, stated:

Although the [Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB)] contends the FTC’s Endorsement Guides are unconstitutional, the Guides apply only to marketing and they attempt to illustrate some of the factors relevant to distinguishing advertising from editorial content,” says Mary Engle, the FTC’s director of the division of advertising practices, in an email statement released today. “If particular communications do not in fact constitute advertising, as the IAB appears to be suggesting, then the Guides do not apply. Where the message is advertising, however, disseminators have an obligation to ensure it is not misleading. This includes, when it is not otherwise clear from the context, identifying when the endorser has been paid for the endorsement. Although IAB may disagree with the policy, nothing in this approach is unconstitutional,” .

From FTC’s Engle terse reply, it’s unlikely to halt the IAB’s attempt to rescind the FTC’s guides.

Even with the FTC contention that the primary targets are advertisers, rather than bloggers, have failed to assuage Rothenberg.

IAB’s Rothenberg contends that even with the FTC’s intention to go after advertisers, rather than bloggers, doesn’t mean that bloggers are off the hook. By it’s “social” nature, bloggers and their blogs are the advertising medium, hence they could still be looking at $11,000 fines.

How will this play out as the December 1st enforcement date draws near?

It’s unlikely that the FTC or IAB are going to back down at the moment, but the IAB’s Washington DC Public Policy office will be keeping very busy till then.

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The 2009 Cone Consumer New Media Study, results of which were released on October 20, shows the continuing growth of consumer empowerment.

Cone, a strategy and communications agency that specializes in cause branding, looked only at users of “new media,” defined as “dialogue among individuals or groups by way of technology-facilitated channels” – social networks, blogs, games, message boards, and the like. Over one-third of the respondents use new media two or more times a week.

Highlights of the study include the following:

1.    Consumers are increasing their interaction with companies and brands online. Almost 80 percent of new media users interact with companies or brands via new media sites and tools. This is an increase of 32 percent from the 2008 study. More than one-third of users (37 percent) interact via new media at least once per week, up from about 25 percent last year. New media users “overwhelmingly believe companies or brands should not only have a presence in new media, but also interact with their consumers in this space,” says Cone. In addition, consumers “think more highly of companies or brands when they or their friends can interact with them in a new media environment.”

2.    Consumers believe they can influence businesses by voicing opinions online. Sixty-two percent of respondents believe they can influence business decisions by voicing opinions via new media channels. About one-quarter have offered their opinion on an issue or contacted a company directly. Consumers are also interested in and influenced by information they get online. A large majority of respondents (85 percent) want companies to tell them what is in products and how they are made. Three-quarters of new media users say new media channels are an effective way to learn about Corporate Responsibility efforts.

3.    Supporting causes is important to new media users. Seventy-nine percent of respondents believe companies and nonprofit organizations should use new media channels to raise money and awareness for causes. Eighty-five percent of respondents say new media provides them with an opportunity to learn about new issues. Eighty percent say new media provides another way to support their favorite causes. Sixty percent have used some form of online or new media to support a cause. However, only 18 percent of users have made a cash donation through new media. Why? Nearly 39 percent said they didn’t trust that their efforts would actually help the cause, and 31 percent said they’d rather support causes offline. While no single cause had a majority of attention, leading causes supported via new media include animal welfare (29 percent), health and disease (28 percent), education (23 percent), the environment (22 percent) and human rights/equal rights (21 percent).

New media users appear to be active, interested and engaged. They are influenced by information they get online – and they believe they can influence businesses by communicating with them online.

It is clear that Internet-savvy consumers have high expectations. They want businesses to use new media. This is good news for online marketers, but there is this cautionary note as well: Businesses need to be ever-vigilant about using new media appropriately, and they must be responsive to consumer inquiries and comments.

Read the rest here:
New Media Study Shows Increasing Consumer Empowerment

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One of the mantras guiding online marketing is to measure everything that matters and then optimize. The typical MO is to run as many CPC programs that you can afford or manage to create a baseline; do A/B or multivariate analysis to optimize; then prune low yield programs and further optimize on the ones with the best returns. But what happens when, despite adherence, to this mantra the historical performance levels of display ads starts to fall?

Recently, ComScore published a study (pdf) showing the number of US consumers who clicked on display ads had dropped by 50% in two years. While drastic the impact could be due to a decline in the number of CPC display and affiliate programs run over that time, however; other factors were implied in the study. Between 2007 and 2009, the number of people who clicked one or more display ads a month dropped to 16%, with about 37% of those users accounting for 50% of all clicks. In shorthand, that means 6% of internet users represent 50% of the clicks, and another 10% representing the remaining 50%. All this indicates a seriously diminishing audience.

While CTR is a standard measure in the online advertising business, these new figures suggest that focusing on click through optimization may be an incomplete or insufficient strategy. Since when has optimization based on only 16% of the user base been a truly encompassing plan?

What about the other 84% of the audience not engaging with display ads? What does it mean for advertisers? If you believe in an efficient market and that online advertising is ahead of the overall advertising industry as recent studies indicate – then something else is at work here. Do display ads, or any ad impressions based advertising, really matter?

On my company and our partners’ sites, we have seen significant traffic spikes to our home page/partner home pages while running CPC, CPM, or CPA programs. This suggests that people are not clicking but going directly to the advertised site. Our internal analytics system has tracked multiple exposures and non-ad clickers to a conversion on our site, verifying that the display ads themselves indeed play a role in driving frequency and/or engagement before an eventual conversion on our site.

So are display ads dead? I don t think so, but display ad CTRs are certainly suspect as a meaningful measurement. The new data and implications about branding, frequency, and engagement lead me to believe that we require a new line of thinking and analytics to measure the true value of such ad units.

Credit:
Display Ad Clicks Drop 50%, Marketers Cringe

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You’d think by now business owners would have figured out that social media is the next tidal wave on the Internet, and that they’d better get on the surfboard or get wiped out. Well, think again. SmartBrief on Social Media,  an e-mail newsletter that goes out to some 30,000 business readers, reports that nearly 85 percent of readers surveyed “have experienced resistance to social media as a business strategy.”

When asked “Where have you encountered the greatest resistance to social media in your organization?” the two leading responses were (not surprisingly) the president/business owner (21 percent) and senior management (20 percent). Of those readers that “successfully overcame resistance to using social media” at their place of business, more than half of them said they “just did it, and served as the role model themselves.”

Chris Brogan, author of the new best-selling book Trust Agents, suggests
it may require more than “just doing it,” however. He thinks it takes good arguments about improving the company’s communications and bottom line, not simply espousing the coolness of social media. He recommends sharing relevant case studies to prove that other businesses are getting legitimate results from using social media. It wouldn’t hurt to get a member of senior management to be a cheerleader, either.

“It’s just a matter of finding the right opportunity to recommend that your company is ready to play in the game,” Brogan says. “It might mean finding your top competitor already using the tools, but hey, that’s won several social media enthusiasts the chance to get things going.”

In an interview with SmartBrief on Social Media, marketing expert Valeria Maltoni, who writes the ConversationAgent blog, reinforces Brogan’s points, saying it’s crucial to “speak the language of business when describing social media” and “focus on the opportunities that exist in the marketplace.” The three most common mistakes Maltoni sees in pitching social media to senior management are not tying the strategy into business goals, lack of insight into where social media can be integrated into the company’s business strategy, and poor execution capabilities.

Maltoni says that entrepreneurs tend to immediately understand the benefits of social media: “They get it, they know they can use the tools to amplify their off-line activities and scale their own presence and participation in customer communities.” Large organizations, on the other hand, may be more resistant because they are “more siloed and less organic.”

The bottom line seems to be that for business leaders to embrace social media, they’ll need to hear a compelling business argument that includes some justification for ROI.

See more here:
Businesses Still Wary of Social Media

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It should come as no surprise that consumers trust reviews more than they trust advertising. But reviews themselves are becoming a form of advertising and based on results of the recent Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey (pdf) it’s working:

“Recommendations by personal acquaintances and opinions posted by consumers online are the most trusted forms of advertising globally,” the Nielsen survey, the largest of its kind, shows that,  “nine in every ten Internet consumers worldwide (90 percent) trust recommendations from people they know, while seven in every ten (70 percent) trust consumer opinions posted online.”

This leads Trendwatching.com, in its September trend report to proclaim:

“Businesses have to understand and accept that consumers’ decision making processes, which ultimately come down to whether they will buy from you or from someone else, have truly shifted to a new, powerful peer-to-peer arena.”

While consumer-influenced purchasing via reviews and recommendations has been occurring online for some time, it certainly seems to be building to a feverish pitch. The very nature of social media encourages friends and acquaintances to freely share information and, therefore, to make opinions about products and services widely known. Trendwatching.com cites ShoutIT as an example of an application that allows consumers’ reviews to easily appear at once on Facebook, Digg, and Delicious pages.

Trendwatching points to a mind-boggling number of reviews floating around in the webosphere. Reviews are encouraged by online companies using consumer feedback as fodder for increasing repeat website visits.

Says Trendwatching: “Expect every industry, every sector, every product to eventually succumb to reviews.” In fact, think of Twitter as an example of a global real-time reviewing tool.

Perhaps the most curious sub-trend of the reviewing trend is the belief that reviews by ordinary, everyday people are just as trustworthy as reviews by supposed experts. While professional reviewers have their place, reviews written by friends, acquaintances, and “consumers whose lifestyles mirror yours” are regarded as relevant and real.

It’s all part of the transparency trend – consumers want to know all about companies and all about products. Increasingly, they demand the ability to instantly compare product benefits and prices online in an effort to get the best deal. The transparency trend means companies will have to be ever more sensitive to their competitors. They’ll also have to rapidly respond to bad reviews and do online damage control.

As Trendwatching says: “It’s ultimately about character, about finding your voice, about your behavior as a brand that, if in tune with the current zeitgeist of ‘openness’ and ‘generosity’, automatically turns transparency into a benefit instead of a threat.”

Read more here:
Reviewing is the New Advertising

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I culled through the this years Inc 5000 Advertising and Marketing list to try to pick out companies primarily focused on performance marketing and broke them into 3 categories.  Here are the top Affiliates, Affiliate OPMs, and Affiliate / CPA networks in the Inc 5000 for 2009 based on Revenue Growth from 2005 to 2008.  If I missed any companies, I appologize, it’s not always easy to identify performance marketing companies by their descriptions on inc.com  and their websites.

Here is the list:

Affiliates in the 2009 Inc 5,000 List of Fastest Growing Private Companies

Company	2009 Ranking	Employees	2008 Revenues
Adlucent	73	20	6.5M
Plus1 Marketing	226	9	3.2M
Lead Research Group	391	25	2.4M
Relocation.com	1469	29	9.2M
Clickspeed	1491	17	5.7M
Memolink	1929	50	34.9M
Wpromote	2004	49	7.1M
LeadCreations.com	2440	8	5.4M
imwave, inc	2610	8	2M
JBR Media Ventures	3634	18	19M
Elephant Group	4530	350	74.3M

Affiliate OPMs in the 2009 Inc 5,000 List of Fastest Growing Private Companies

Company	2009 Ranking	Employees	2008 Revenues
Direct Agents	1080	35	23.2M
NETexponent	1216	16	6.1M

Affiliate Networks in the 2009 Inc 5,000 List of Fastest Growing Private Companies

Company	2009 Ranking	Employees	2008 Revenues
IntegraClick	5	55	96.4M
One Technologies	8	89	50.7M
MediaTrust	9	60	38.3M
Affiliate Media	129	25	7.7M
Gilispa	137	15	30.7M
Go Internet Media	146	35	7.6M
Smiley Media	168	24	31.4M
Hyper Interactive Media	184	47	41.3M
Lead Flash	314	45	49.9M
Intermark Media	320	40	56.9M
Hydra	450	70	108.6M
The Media Crew	488	14	3.2M
IronTraffic	512	21	6.9M
Clearlink	589	182	22.3M
MarketLeverage	1115	51	35.3M
Trancos	1120	50	18.3M
Spectrum Direct	1271	30	10.3M
Bridgevine	1379	65	21.5M
One on One Marketing	1430	46	62.1M
Plasmid Media	2897	6	2.3M

Excerpted from:
2009 Top Performance Marketing Companies in the Inc 5000

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Recent commentary suggests the placement and shape of online ads may be more important than size. This calls into question the strategy of using bigger, more intrusive ads on web pages to gain awareness and create impact.

In an Ad Age Digital article, Ken Mallon of Dynamic Logic says a recent study conducted by the ad effectiveness measurement firm indicated it was a modest 180-pixel by 150-pixel rectangular ad that performed best. While Mallon admits Dynamic Logic hasn’t done enough research on the relatively new “giant” ads, he says “…among the limited range, it looks like where they’re located on the page and their shape is more important than size.”

As the Ad Age article suggests, Mallon’s comments represent only one aspect of what may be the continuing fall in effectiveness of online ads that are too big or too intrusive. A June 2009 LinkedIn Research/Harris Poll found (pdf) that consumers were getting increasingly frustrated with certain types of online ads. For example, 80 percent of consumer respondents found ads that expand on the page and cover the content they are trying to read to be “very frustrating,” while 12 percent found them “somewhat frustrating.”

That’s a piss-off factor of over 90 percent! About the same percentage, shy a few points, found that ads where consumers can’t find the close/skip button, and ads that automatically pop up, were also “very frustrating.”

Mallon told Ad Age that he questions the effectiveness of old standbys such as skyscraper and leaderboard ads as well because, he says, consumers have developed “banner blindness.” Rectangular ads may be more effective because they are close to or even integrated into the content.

Dynamic Logic believes ads bordering content are least effective, and that simple Flash is an overused, weak format. Real media with video is preferable. The firm suggests changing ad placement from page to page so consumers don’t get used to finding them in the same place.

The current discussion reminds me of the old days when magazines would often find that ads mimicking editorial content, or ads with long, engaging copy, would outperform traditional display ads. Whether in print or online, ads are most effective when they intrigue, inform, and entertain rather than annoy and frustrate the consumer. This is why simple online text ads, and smaller display ads that are well-integrated with content, may ultimately be the most effective advertising of all.

See the rest here:
Ad Effectiveness Not All About Size

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By cloudvertising, I don’t mean logos in the sky. Rather, I mean social media  completely changing how online ads are targeted. In a word, users are going to target advertisers, not vice versa.

It’s no secret that CPMs and CTRs aren’t what they used to be. And while part of this is banner blindness, and part of it is the economy, I think the biggest contributor is the habits of end-users plus basic human psychology.

You see, the nature of the web is that it gives us on-demand content, so we end up not noticing the content we’re not looking for. But more importantly, we distrust online ads because they run counter to the experience that draws us online in the first place. I go online to get what I want when I want it, and I never really want advertising. As Douglas Haddow put it:

“Unlike the television viewer, the Internet user has been conditioned to distrust online advertising from the beginning, due to its association with viruses and overall desktop dysfunction.”

And this is even truer with social media, where users log-on to interact with other users, and where a lot of the content consumed is user-generated — by their personal network.

Right now, there aren’t many options for targeting ads. You target them according to either a user’s search query, keywords on a page, or based on what you think a site’s audience might be. All of these methods share the assumption that third-party content can be used to accurately target a user. And the problem with such an assumption is that third-party content doesn’t say anything about the audience; it can only tell you about the publisher.

And publishers have a different mandate than advertisers. Their mandate is to keep their audience happy, and advertising doesn’t do that. But as long as they keep getting page views, they can sell ad space and stay in business.

The result is that ad spots sell for less than they could because advertisers never know when an impression or click is going to be a dud. So the only way to sell that space is to price it at a low enough rate that it offsets the advertiser’s uncertainty. The result is that publishers make less money than they could, and advertisers get fewer results.

This is where cloudvertising comes in. Cloudvertising is an extension of cloud computing, and social media is a big part of what makes up the cloud. What social media contributes to the cloud is data — data about users, by users.

And rather than leaving advertiser to guess what demographic might be interested in their product and who it is they actually end up targeting, this user-generated-data can used to turn things around and let users target them.

You see, user activity “in the cloud” all comes down to user-generated-content: they’re uploading and sharing content continuously, whether it’s vacation slides, bookmarks, or conversations. And this content tells us more about a user than any demographic analysis. It tells us about their actual interests and even what happens to be on their mind.

So user-generated-content becomes user-generated-data, and that data is much more personalized than any other data-set available. Cloudvertising is about indexing and mining all this user-generated-data, and then using that data to target users with ads that will actually appeal to them, and then convert.

So what would a cloudvertising platform do, exactly?

Well, it would do four important things:

• First, it would support all popular online ad models (CPM, CPC, and CPA)
• Second, it would be integrated with social media APIs (Tweet this, Digg this, etc.)
• Third, it would refer back to all your social networking content (wall posts, tweets, etc.), indexed it, determine your interests, and profile you.
• Then, it would show you ads that you might actually (1) be interested in and (2) act on.

If there happens to be no CPM advertisers in the system that fit your profile it might show you a CPA offer that appeals to you. So the advertiser doesn’t squander an impression, and the publisher still has a chance of making a commission from an ad that has a high likelihood of converting.
The root problem facing publishers isn’t so much falling ad revenues, but that ad technology hasn’t yet caught up with content technology. Once it does, both publishers and advertisers will be better off because there’ll be less uncertainty, fewer inefficiencies, and market ad rates will actually reflect full potential value of the ad space.

The resources for a new ad technology are there: they’re social media and all the user-generated-data produced through it. It’s really just a matter of time before one of the big guys, like Google or Facebook, rolls out something like it. Such technology may be the life preserver many publishers today need to stay afloat.

The question is with the advent of such new technology will overcome the filters the target audience has developed or whether human psyche will simply adapt more advanced forms of banner blindness?

View original post here:
Cloudvertising: Social Media and Online Ad Targeting

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I like David Berkowitz’s post on Social Media Insider about “CPSA” because it prompts an important discussion about pricing models.

In proposing the possibility of “CPSA” – Cost Per Social Action – Berkowitz recognizes the fact that “social networking, when done right, achieves something much different” from the current pricing models, Cost Per Impression (CPM), Cost Per Click (CPC), and Cost Per Action (CPA). Cost Per Engagement (CPE) gets closer, says Berkowitz, but still falls short.

The big difference, says Berkowitz, is that social marketing is all about relationships, and no one has figured out just yet how to put that in a neat little box. It is much more grey than it is black and white. Berkowitz himself acknowledges that the notion of “CPSA” has so many downsides it may be all but impossible to implement. For example, how do you even decide on common criteria when you’re trying to measure the impact of Facebook vs. MySpace vs. Twitter vs. any other social media, when each of them has a uniquely different twist and, as a result, require different metrics?

Whether or not CPSA is plausible is less important than the point that Internet marketers should be thinking creatively when it comes to new pricing models. In fact, marketers should be thinking about pricing issues even as they’re developing new media options.

One of the interesting problems with Internet-speed marketing is by the time someone figures out how to make money off of something, the entire paradigm changes. That’s why anticipating market conditions is essential.

CPM is based on traditional media costs, using television, radio, magazines, and newspapers as the model. It’s easy to figure out because it is all about reach. CPC and CPA are derived from direct marketing. Direct marketers count inquiries or orders to measure their ROI. Pretty simple metrics.

Social marketing could turn the revenue impact of the Internet on its head. Adoption of CPSA style pricing models could herald the same evolution that happened when the advent of database marketing made direct marketing more sophisticated, and the industry adopted “relationship marketing” as its mantra. That caused direct marketers to reconsider measuring merely inquiries and orders, and start measuring the long-term value of the customer.

Gadzooks, this is not really that much different from what Berkowitz is talking about, is it? Seems the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Read the original:
Cost Per What?!

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