Make Money Online

There are few online to offline success stories. Often they are limited to large brands who are either part of the technology industry or whose consumer base are early adopters to technology trends. Which is why when Media Trust, ranked as the 9^th fastest growing company by Inc Magazine, joined forces with a little known driver outside of NASCAR circles named Joe Nemechek no one expected quick success. The results surprised everyone. I sat down with Peter Bordes, CEO of MediaTrust, to discuss that success.

How did the deal come together with Global Media Minds, Joe Nemechek, and NASCAR?

The whole thing happened very rapidly. In NASCAR there has been a contraction in the amount of sponsorship money available for drivers due to the economy. GMM approached us literally weeks before the racing season started with the idea. We decided to take on the challenge as a case study with the goal of creating a different way of packaging various elements of online marketing within the world of NASCAR racing. GMM had all these parts for Joe in place that weren’t really being leveraged:  a late 90’s style website, a Twitter account that was sort of being used, and a Facebook account that was only partially up to date. Nothing was really integrated together. So we ripped it apart and put it together in the short timeframe we had. What you see now is just version one of our concept, there are two or three more evolutions yet to come.

How has the response been?

I have to say the attention we’ve gotten so far with this project is phenomenal.  We built the Media Trust brand leveraging social media but I don’t think you really understand the concept of engagement until you get behind the wheel of a social campaign with someone that is a celebrity. We first looked at Joe Nemechek’s personal site and his official site NEMCO Motorsports but decided that we should start from scratch with FrontRowJoe.com.

So we started with the fundamentals putting all the pieces together, setting up tracking to measure sign-ups and clicks, integrating Twitter and Facebook, getting Joe to personally buy into using the social platforms more methodically. Joe began posting regularly and the following grew quickly from about a thousand to just under five thousand users in Facebook and took the Twitter from in the hundreds to just under three thousand.

It’s groundbreaking because none of the other NASCAR drivers, to my knowledge, are remotely leveraging social media the way we did. Our efforts actually brought in two sponsors.  One of these is England’s Stove Works, which is not necessarily a typical sponsor. We were able to drive a half a million dollars in sponsorship revenue. For having put everything together in three weeks we’ve been enormously successful.

It’s kind of allowing Joe to be real spokesperson. Instead of the drivers just wearing the logos he can actually talk to the audience and react.

Exactly!  When we began working on the campaign we spoke with other companies who had sponsored NASCAR drivers and they all said, “We love NASCAR but we just could never figure out what our return was from it.” I talked to the CEO of Liberty Medical and he’s like “I love what you guys are doing!” And he even sent me a picture of his car and was like, “We love NASCAR, we’d love to sponsor it, I just couldn’t figure out how to make sense of it.”  Because what is my logo on the car worth?

But if you can have the driver talking about Liberty Medical its like  now he’s off and running. When the driver is talking about the brand you need the mechanisms in place to be able to really connect with the fan base. Not just through some static website but through interactive mediums like Facebook and Twitter. It’s amazing how quickly you’ll see people coming to that brand and transacting.

That’s how it was with England Stove Works. We drove half a million dollars worth of transactions initiated by our efforts with FrontRowJoe! In a way Joe became a super affiliate. That success with this experiment can certainly be replicated.

Quite an experiment; it seems to have out reached its goals. What were Joe’s team and GMM initially hoping for from this?

We really had no idea. This was a complete and total shot in the dark but it was better than nothing. Joe’s agency had been working with us on other projects and knew that we were able to look at the broad online universe and take a holistic new approach to the channel. It was either that or nothing so what have we got to loose in trying something new?  Let’s leverage Joe’s passion for the fans and history  as a driver and see if we can possibly generate revenue online. Let’s experiment and find out, we have nothing to lose, we have a willing driver, we have a great agency and a group of people to work plus if this model works it can be replicated within the NASCAR industry.

I’d say this has gone metric wise way past anything we could possibly imagine.  What’s great is that the season’s not even over yet and we’re definitely going to have a phenomenal case study.

How did you track the affiliate and social media ROI?

Everything was built in a dynamic environment so we could look at the results daily and start tweaking the campaign as we went. First there was the car itself which had no sponsors, so we thought “Let’s make Joe his own sponsor and put FrontRowJoe.com all over the car.” That would drive fans to a website designed purely with marketing in mind. We started to track metrics to optimize: how many people were coming in, from where were they engaging, what were they signing up for, the newsletter, what products were they clicking on.

Using Google Analytics we measured which channel, Twitter or Facebook, was stronger giving us a very clear picture of our efforts right down to the Tweet. We could see which Tweets and posts in Facebook worked, what type of call actions we used  in the posts did not. It’s been a very effective mechanism for allowing us to adjust as we go.

For the affiliate side, to track offers, we used our own proprietary affiliate tracking technology.  It’s really very interesting, prior to working with Joe, I didn’t realize how many affiliates are NASCAR fans. It’s huge!

For the New England Stove sponsorship we set up a tracking mechanism on their website. When a user came from NASCAR  a special discount or offer would trigger so we could see what the effect of the traffic that we were sending out was.

How are the offers on Front Row Joe picked?

At first it was fairly blind. We just looked at the demographics, the geographics, the “demo-geos”,  and where the races were held. We guessed the categories that would be popular, like DirectTV and offers from Force Factor because that was primarily more the “demo-geo” of Middle America. As the clicks came in we started to find out there were more females interacting with Joe and with NASCAR drivers than there were males which was something that none of us would have expected.  So what we are now doing is looking at the data of who is signing up into the database and which offers are getting interacted with.  Currently all the optimization is being done by hand but we’ll start applying technology to it.

So now that you’ve had this success what do you hope to replicate from the lessons you’ve learned?

What we want to do is really turn Front Row Joe into an actual brand. Not only for Joe, himself, but for NASCAR. The website will be completely rebuilt to focus on providing unique content from each race for the fans with content from the pits, from the front row with the drivers and will also provide visitors a much deeper integration with social media sharing features.  There have actually been other drivers that are interested in taking part after having seen this. Everyone is pretty astounded by the success, especially considering Joe has crashed and burned in every race but yet you’re still getting this incredible traction with the sponsors and the fans.

Once someone has gained some affinity with the fans it doesn’t necessarily matter if they’ve placed in the winner’s circle because they’ve built up this relationship over the years.

Exactly!  You know Angel, I’ve got a pretty big following within online marketing industry but I’ve never been able to generate the kind of response with my personal Tweets as I’ve seen Joe generate with NASCAR fans. The speed and responsiveness from those fans is just phenomenal! People are coming up to Joe in the pits and saying, “I saw your Tweet, “it’s faster than a tweeting bullet” that was great!”

My background is in mass media. Mass media and mass marketing is changing forever to “me media” and “me marketing” and I think this is a great demonstration of that.  And relationship is the point because consumers are getting so smart they can tell if someone has an  authentic social presence or not. We have tons of people coming on the site and saying, “Joe, is this really Joe?”

Which is why it’s important to have Joe excited and fully involved for this to work. You have to have the authenticity of the voice of these guys and this is what we’ve done with just one of them. The success certainly can be replicated.

Still, you have to be a little careful not to bastardize this because there is a lot of responsibility that comes along with engaging fans.  Social media is unregulated and if marketing agencies get a hold of a medium for the wrong reasons it can totally ruin this channel  just as quickly as it ruined other channels. I think there’s a big responsibility that comes along with this as we start seeing power of harnessing social media. Done right it can create a lot of value for the fans.

Here is the original:
MediaTrust Sets the Pace with NASCAR Success

These days, any discussion of social media usually refers to the “big three” – Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. MySpace, the social network that started it all, is conspicuously absent from the list.

The decline of MySpace resembles the first-to-market stumbles of such giants as AOL and Yahoo! Just being first isn’t good enough when technology advances at rates beyond the speed of light.

But apparently, MySpace isn’t ready to throw in the towel. In what is being widely regarded as a re-launch, MySpace announced this week that a new version of the site is in the works and will be implemented in stages over the next several months.

The direction MySpace is taking seems a little like back to the future: the network will re-trench and focus on its core strength of entertainment – music, videos, and celebrities. As MySpace co-president Jason Hirschhorn said, “It goes back to discovery and self-expression. That’s where we came from and where MySpace really made its mark…”

A work in progress, MySpace has already dumped such random things as classifieds, horoscopes, job boards, and weather. Instead, the network will employ information from its users to “recommend movie trailers, recently released songs and video games.”

Ironically, MySpace does lead in at least one area: the company recently announced that MySpace Mobile is the most popular social application for the Android smartphone. MySpace was also the first social network to be included in Microsoft’s new Outlook Social Connector, which adds social networking to the Outlook email application.

These victories notwithstanding, the larger question looms: Can MySpace regain any sort of leadership position in the social media world? Right now, all the statistics say no. MySpace claims to have over 100 million users worldwide, but Facebook has over 400 million active users. In February, about 111 million people in the U.S. visited Facebook, a 95 percent increase from a year ago, while MySpace had about 67 million visitors, a 5 percent decrease, according to ComScore. eMarketer projects over $450 million of ad spending with Facebook this year – a 26 percent increase – while MySpace will likely drop 23 percent to about $360 million. Even worse, the ad deal MySpace has with Google is scheduled to expire in August 2010.

If MySpace is to survive, the more likely scenario is that it becomes a niche player in the entertainment world rather than a major social networking site. But that online market is also crowded. Maybe this re-orientation would make it of interest to online marketers involved in the music and movie business, but still, MySpace risks becoming just another entertainment site.

Jon Miller, Chief Digital Officer for News Corp., the owner of MySpace, tells the Los Angeles Times, “We need to be a platform for self-expression that is clearly differentiated from the competition.” But you have to wonder – given the success of Facebook, the growth of Twitter, and the video creativity demonstrated on YouTube – is it even possible for MySpace to get noticed?

Excerpted from:
Last Gasp for MySpace?

Television advertising is often seen as a measure of mainstream acceptance online technology. It is clear that location based mobile applications have arrived after Foursquare’s  20 second commercial run on the Bravo network. Foursquare, an app where users share their location with friends through a “check-in”, is one of a sudden glut of location apps and the first to advertise on a large television network. Others have made use of this technology for a number of reasons, including allowing business such as Starbucks to target consumers with coupons. All the attention has made users are all too eager to provide their whereabouts when asked, leading to privacy concerns.

Typically, users turn to these applications to:

• Conquer boredom: Apps like Foursquare allow people to communicate with others in the same location. Rain delay at a sports event? Connected users can complain about the high cost of snacks and uncomfortable seating. Stranded at an airport? It’s easy to hook up with others in the same predicament.
• Gain recognition: Many of these apps recognize frequent contributors or participants by recognizing their “achievements”. For example, Foursquare users can earn badges for different check-ins.
• Explore: Let’s not forget, location aware apps help users find local businesses, hotels, restaurants, and other places of interest. In addition to the entertainment value, these applications really help people find what they need.

Privacy

As popular and helpful as location aware apps can be, there is a huge risk when they are used. Broadcasting your whereabouts opens the door to a host of privacy related issues that many people don’t even think about when they fire up these applications:

Big Brother

Tracking, of course, is an inherent part of such technology. Use of which could be leveraged for surveillance purposes. As Carnegie Mellon University Professor Lorrie F. Cranor, who conducted several studies about privacy issues and location-sharing technologies, stated in her testimony to Congress:

“Due to the way cellular technology works, for example, the widespread use of cell phones enables round-the-clock surveillance of citizens. It is important that the storage of individual location data be minimized and protections be put in place to limit when it can be disclosed to the government.”

Cyber Stalking

Cyber stalking was made popular when social networking was making its climb. With location aware services, cyber stalking can be taken to a whole new level. Broadcasts can be used not only to follow victims, but gather information about their likes, interests, hobbies, and anything else that can be useful in their pursuits.

Exposed Irresponsibility

Just as GPS devices have been used to track an employee’s movements while on the clock, location aware services can show an employee, or spouse, to be somewhere other than where they should be. An employee who calls in sick can be exposed when a location aware broadcast shows them to be at the ballpark.

Please Rob Me

When a user broadcasts their home address for the world to see, a few of these people will catch on that when the user checks-in somewhere else, they are not at home. Criminals who understand how this works can easily pick targets where they can be assured that the resident is not at home. Making this even easier are sites like pleaserobme.com that lists Foursquare users that have checked-in somewhere other than their home address.

A matter of trust

When it comes to trust, technology works in reverse. While most businesses spend years trying to establish a brand and consumer trust, people genuinely throw all of their trust into a new technology. It isn’t until the dangers are exposed that they begin to question the faith they have put into it. This can be seen in how people have reacted to Internet technologies over the years.

At first, the Internet was considered a reliable resource. “I read it on the Internet,” was a mantra that was soon mocked as people began to realize that not everything that was published online was factual, or safe. When social media came along, people had no qualms about posting the most intimate details of their lives for others to see. That is, until employers started browsing these sites to get a better glimpse into personal lives of their prospective employees. Now, young adults are growing less trustworthy of posting everything to social media sites.

As time goes by, people will grow to become hesitant before allowing their exact location to be broadcast for everyone to see. As that trust factor diminishes, location aware apps will begin to adapt to the culture of their users. It is the hopes of many application developers that the industry self-regulates since there is growing talk of the need to create standards and regulations to govern these applications. However, until that time comes, users need to take responsibility.

Some things to consider when using location aware applications are:

• Know how the apps you use collect and use your information.
• Look for clear opt-in/opt-out procedures. If they don’t exist, don’t use the app.
• Know the app store’s certification policy. Does the store check the integrity of the app and how it handles data or do they just allow any app created in their store?
• Know where data collected by the app migrates to. It is one thing to collect your information, but what the company does with it after they have it is another story.

See the original post:
User Awarness Key to Privacy with Location Apps

A world in which customers walk through the door of a business and get a coupon especially crafted for them is much closer, thanks to Foursquare.

The application, which has become the dominant player in the world of mobile, geo-specific check-ins, has unveiled a set of analytics for businesses which will put a name and a face to loyal customers.

The dashboard, which is still in alpha, is debuting for 30 select customers before a bigger roll-out. The dashboard gives businesses a look at who is checking in, breaks them down by when they come in, gender, and number of visits. Businesses will also be able to see which platform customers are using to share their status.  If your visitors are heavy into Twitter or Facebook, you can follow them there. Other types of information tracked includes: total check-ins, unique visitors, male-to-female ratio, and top visitors.

Writes Zachary Wilson of Fast Company,

“With priceless data like this, it’s easy to imagine a blow-up in participating venues coming soon. More businesses means more users, more users means more businesses, and suddenly Foursquare is the Facebook of check-ins.”

Foursquare plans to add additional real-time information for business users, including weather updates. Potentially, this dashboard could be used by large chain businesses (like a Wal-Mart or Starbucks) from a central location with a view of all of their outlets in real time.

“We’ve been talking with quite a few [large corporations] who are excited about the potential for this,” said Tristan Walker, Business Development at Foursquare, in an interview with Mashable. “Once we can add purchase information on top of check-ins things can get pretty interesting.”

This valuable information helps Foursquare give itself even more distance ahead of competitors like Gowalla, and the addition of a newly designed iPhone app will give FourSquare an additional bump in users.

As the dashboard and analytics are tweaked, based on the alpha tests, plans are to introduce the service to the 1,000 or so registered businesses currently running specials on Foursquare.

Read the original:
Foursquare Offers Up User Data with Check-in Analytics

Reports are flying around cyberspace that Twitter will soon be introducing ads. Just recently, Twitter’s head of monetization, Anamitra Banerji, said the company would launch at least a beta test of ads, possibly within a month.

The word on the street is that Twitter’s ads will maintain the 140 characters-or-less mandate, and that the ads will be tied to Twitter searches, not unlike Google’s original ads. If this is true, then Twitter users will potentially only see ads if they are searching for something.

Ads on Twitter should be of interest to online marketers. Whether you personally use Twitter or not, you can’t ignore the 27 million users who tweet. And it isn’t just consumers – somewhere around half of the world’s largest companies are officially on Twitter.

That user base may be a far cry from the 400 million active users of Facebook, which also offers ads, but it is still an impressive number. Because of the nature of Twitter, its users are largely a mobile bunch. That means a Twitter advertiser could very effectively target an audience that is likely to be receptive to mobile marketing campaigns.

Apparently, some potential advertisers are already turning up their noses at the idea.

“Advertising on Twitter will feel like your social media strategy has failed,” says Paul Troy, global head of advertising and content for Britain’s Barclaycard.

“It doesn’t feel like something leading brands will do.” Cheryl Calverley, a senior global manager for Unilever’s Axe Skin, questions the value of Twitter ads because, she says, Twitter “doesn’t have the reach of broadcast media.”

Those comments not withstanding, if Twitter does indeed launch its own ads, there will undoubtedly be advertisers who will try them. The larger issue, however, involves the inevitable commercialization of every medium. At one time, there was an admittedly naïve belief that social media platforms such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter should remain ad-free. Let’s be real, though: they have to make money. As soon as a medium gains critical mass, its owners have to be thinking about ways to become profitable. Search and social media sites offer free access, so there aren’t many options for revenue generation other than advertising.

Still, some ads on social media platforms may stretch the limits, leading marketers to question whether such advertising is too intrusive. An article in The New York Times points to the “self-service” ads on Facebook as an example: “Many advertisers who use the self-service system are tempted to go as far as possible in making ads that attract attention and appear relevant, aided by the information that people give to Facebook.”

While very targeted ads may seem like a good idea, they can also turn off some consumers, says The Times:

“From the perspective of many users, the tailored ads can often seem, at best, presumptuous. Women who change their status to “engaged” on Facebook to share the news with their friends, for example, report seeing a flood of advertisements for services and products like wedding photographers, skin treatments and weight-loss regimens.”

If and when Twitter launches its advertising program, it may very well fall prey to advertising that is not always tasteful. But that is unlikely to stop Twitter from moving forward. Like other social media, Twitter must deal with economic reality.

Go here to read the rest:
Twitter Goes Commercial

Last week, Facebook was granted a patent for its news feed. Although it’s not yet clear how Facebook plans to use this patent, what is clear is that social media is growing up to be a real industry with real business sense.

With this patent, Facebook is in an excellent position to generate revenue off of its competitors’ success. But more importantly, securing intellectual property like this is a sign that the social network plans to be something much more than a place where to kill time at work.

Owning the Stream

The strange thing about Twitter’s success is that Twitter is more of a feature than a stand alone social network. That much is evident in how easily both Facebook and Google Buzz assimilated the Twitter stream format. And with the granting of this patent, Twitter might not even own the rights to itself anymore. As the patent abstract reads:

A method for displaying a news feed in a social network environment is described. The method includes generating news items regarding activities associated with a user of a social network environment and attaching an informational link associated with at least one of the activities, to at least one of the news items, as well as limiting access to the news items to a predetermined set of viewers and assigning an order to the news items.

It’s easy to see how a few social networking sites might be wondering where this leaves them. In fact, the very concept of a news feed seems to be part of what makes a social networking world go round. So now that one company owns the idea, they seem to have that whole world in their hands.

Intellectual Property & Market Share

In business, the real money is in intellectual property — it’s in owning ideas, content, and technology. And given how so many social networks are struggling with their revenue models, it makes perfect sense for these companies to start securing the rights to the basic features that make their their user experience what it is. With that in mind, there are three different things that Facebook could choose to do with this patent.

First, Facebook could decide to do nothing, and just keep this patent up their sleeve as a bargaining chip for some future negotiation with a rival. For instance, should Facebook explore some kind of search/advertising partnership with Google in the future, they could remind Google that Google Buzz is in violation of their patent, and use that to negotiate a more advantageous deal.

Second, they could decide to push out the competition by denying them the use of this feature. This will force many of Facebook’s rivals to close-up shop and users will end up spending more and more of their online time on Facebook than on some (now defunct) alternative.

Finally, and more in line with social media’s spirit of cooptition, Facebook can use this patent to charge their competition licensing fees for their news item feature. Not only would this bolster their ad revenues, but it would let them profit off of the success of their competitors.

This last strategy would also be a more sustainable one because it would give competitors a comfortable sphere of operation, and help prevent them from having to innovate entirely new ways of offering their own online user experience. Besides, users’ attentions are limited, and Facebook is probably nearing their maximum potential mind share as is, and this last approach would allow them to capture additional market share without having to capture additional mind share.

Buying Up More Than You Can Chew

Of course, winning this patent may only be the beginning (and not the end) of the intellectual property battle for Facebook. As Shevonne Polastre, a writer for Penn Olson pointed out, not only was Facebook not the first to come up with a news feed, and:

Due to the difference between Facebook’s newsfeed in 2006 and today, many of these social networking sites can have ways around it. Twitter can say that it’s a microblogging service, which has nothing to do with status updates. LinkedIn can say that it’s only tailored to business. Google can say that it’s a social aggregator, and not really providing updates on specific people.

So while it’s not quite clear what this patent is really going to end up meaning for the social media industry, what is clear is that social media is growing up. This kind of intellectual property strategy is the stuff that big industry is made of. It can be used to raise barriers to entry and put the competition out of business. It can control the competition by making them dependent on you. In the case of Facebook, the latter of the two options makes a lot more sense and seem much more likely.

More here:

Unless they are prefaced by dollar signs, numbers are not sexy, which is why social media experts have spent years avoiding them. Like the cool kids, they often seem more interested in being invited to the party than delving into what the party is for. The argument is often that numbers and metrics only serve as distractions to engagement and dialogue.

As a model matures in order for it to maintain a business role, make no mistake social media is about business, its impact needs to be quantifiable. Forrester Research estimates that social media will make up 3% of overall interactive marketing spend in the US in 2010 with the highest delta of growth in any channel over the next four years. As social media’s channel grows so will the pressure to quantify.

Brian Solis, author and principal of the FurtureWorks agency, recently posted a well written piece about the Maturation of Social Media ROI on Mashable. In it he tackles the main crux behind the issue that many CMOs are spending against social media without being able to quantify a return on those efforts. Brian believes this is:

“A direct result of not tying activity to an end game, the ability to know what it is we want to measure before we engage. Doing so, allows us to define a strategy and a tactical plan to support activity that helps us reach our goals and objectives.”

Warm and Fuzzy Metrics

It used to be that simply being invited to or crashing the social media party was enough. Companies hired interns to catalog content and rushed to create Facebook Fan Pages and Twitter accounts, often because everyone else was doing it.

Then came what I like to call “warm and fuzzy metrics”. Words like engagement, participation, and involvement became key terms for defining online interactions with consumers. Similar to views in CPM, these terms are measured in volume of followers or retweets. Influencers sprouted from this tactic as a way to amplify that volume; after all you wanted to have the best DJ at your party.

Then came terms like trust and affinity; these were less fuzzy in nature and involved a brand’s core group of followers.

Of the warm and fuzzy metrics of social media ROI, only customer service is tangible. Both in terms of the increased ability for people to rate and review products, as well as the opportunity for customer service teams to engage and provide proactive response.

If your company is just participating in social media than maybe the fuzzy metrics are enough. If your company is running social media campaigns and considers social media a marketing channel than fuzzy metrics are a great way to get your budget slashed. It is no coincidence that, according to MarketingSherpa, inability to measure ROI, lack of budget funding, and management resistance are barriers to companies implementing social media campaigns:

For those who insist that “marketing is not sales”, I invite you to use that exact statement with your CMO and see how quickly your budget is diverted elsewhere. As David Vellante, co-founder of ITCentrix, Barometrix, and The Wikibon Project, cautions:

“I’ve seen multimillion-dollar print and television advertising initiatives get the green light because CMOs understood the media — and I’ve seen $10,000 social-media efforts scratched because execs didn’t get it.”

The Key is Return on Ad Spend

ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) is what many CMOs will look at when considering budget allocation against a marketing channel. By definition it has a tighter set of parameters than ROI because it doesn’t consider less fuzzy elements like branding or engagement. This metric for success is specifically looking for a direct dollar value generated as compared to the actual budget being spent.

If, as a study by Bazaarvoice indicates, 80% of CMOs expect upwards of 5% of their revenue to come through the social media channel then the spend against generating revenue better be tracked.

According to Fast Company, Dell made over $3 million in revenue through the Dell Outlet account on Twitter.  But, considering much of what happens in Dell’s Twitter account is coupon or offer driven, what was the true ROAS of hitting that $3 million? Never mind the additional cost of coordinating social media tactics and messaging within a company as big as Dell which, as Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger for Dell Inc says is challenging, “Executing against all those [social media] strategies will take a lot more effort and collaboration between many departments within the company.”

More telling is a recent report by Omniture on the impact of a social media campaign for National Geographic. While the campaign was seen as a success, in the report the Omniture analyst states that traffic from social media is 20x less likely to purchase than average visitor.

Laying the Foundation

What rings true for Dell is true for both large and small business interested in participating in social media.  Collaboration between all stakeholders is necessary in order for a campaign to reach its potential.  Here are the steps you need to take to lay a proper foundation for launch.

1. Know Your End Game: As Brian Solis said defining your end game is necessary in order to be able to quantify results.  Know what are you trying to accomplish and how you want to try keep track of it all.
2. Define Your Metrics: What metrics do you need to track to quantify results: Leads, Registration, Sales?
3. Check Your Tracking: I can’t tell you how often a new client doesn’t have the right pixel/cookie set on the right confirmation page. If your success metric is sales make sure you’re not just tracking leads. This requires testing.
4. Set Expectations: Benchmarking is great way for you and your CMO to have realistic expectations from a campaign. Fireclick and Coremetrics are two tools that can provide benchmarks based on industry averages related to conversion rates, cart abandonment, and other valuable data. They also allow you to pull data from a specific vertical.

Intelligence Gathering

This is where you gather the numbers that will let you know how your campaign is doing and where the dollars are. There are a lot of tools out there that will provide pretty dashboards but few that provide useful data. Here are some of the tools I recommend:

1. Google Analytics: Google Analytics is the defacto analytics system in most companies. You can track visits, page views, bounce rates, etc. Be sure, if sales are a key metric, that the ecommerce portion is activated.
2. Hitwise: Owned by Experian, Hitwise relies on ISP data of approximately 10 million users in the United States alone. Although an expensive solution, their Clickstream data provides some of the best intelligence on upstream and downstream traffic to your website.
3. Coremetrics: Along with their benchmarking services Coremetrics offers an analytics suite whose main differentiator rests in what they call their LIVE (Lifetime Individual Visitor Experience) Profiles. This is essentially an analytics expansion on the concept of customer types.
4. Fireclick: Owned by Digital River, is a streamlined version of many of the tools available for free through Google Analytics but in an easier to customize interface. The main advantage here is their Advanced Marketing Suite which ties you into other vendors and components in the Digital River portfolio.
5. Radian6: Radian6 is a buzz monitoring software that allows you to monitor certain keyword sets and capture data round them. The data includes such things sentiment, engagement, reach, and inbound links. It also allows you to port that data to your CRM.
6. HubSpot: In some ways HubSpot is more of a site optimization tool than an analytics tool. It does compile interesting sets of data around competitors and around reach as well as lead identification tools.
7. Omniture: I have a love/hate relationship with Omniture. Used correctly, with sufficient internal technical resources as well as buy-off from the marketing team on consistent use of campaign hierarchy, SiteCatalyst along with the other Omniture, is an amazing if overly complicated resource. It is however a very expensive one and there is a reason that Omniture holds yearly conferences on how to use their product.  They have a great Facebook app measuring toolset.

Making Sense of it All

Having the tools to capture the data you need is great but numbers are of little value if they are not actionable.  Here are some guidelines to avoid drowning in the data:

1. What to Do When the Numbers Don’t Match: First of all get the notion of the numbers matching out of your head. The numbers between two analytics systems will rarely, if ever, produce an exact match. The objective is to look for trends in the data and ignore anomalies that are not statistically relevant. If the data matches within 10% or less variable then consider the data to be inline. If the variant is 11%-49% then it might be worth doing some due diligence. For instance are all the pages that should be tagged, tagged correctly? If the variant is greater than 50% then something is wrong with the setup itself or with one of the systems you are using.
2. Spotting Trends is Vital: One of the most common mistakes I see is when business get excited about high sales numbers while completely ignoring the fact they overspent to get those numbers. Sales matter little if ROAS is in the negative. Trends are a great way to spot deltas which often provide indicators of the health of campaign. Sample key trends are:
   1. number of new to file customers
   2. number of transactions
   3. changes in repeat customers
   4. number of customer referrals
   5. uplift in other marketing channels
3. 3) Looks for Wildcards and Outliers: Sometimes you are so focused on the campaign data that you become blind to important clues. My favorite personal example of this was during the measurement of a campaign that Jones Soda ran with I Can Has Cheezburger in 2008. If you looked just at the number of sales that directly came from the I Can Has Cheezburger website the campaign numbers barely broke even.  However, when we looked closer at the analytics data we saw 12,000 additional posts created because of the campaign. When attributable sales from those posts were factored in sales showed 172% month-over-month growth and 42% year-over-year growth!With the amount of distribution sources available in social media always take time to see if elements of your campaign have been distributed beyond the initial sites you targeted. It will allow you to spot new opportunities to expand your campaigns.
4. Cross-channel Cannibalization and the Last Cookie in Debate: Most advertisers use cookies to know which ad network to pay and which marketing channel to credit for sales. Shannon Paul, community manager for PEAK6 Online and OptionsNewsNetwork, had a great post on this debate here. Cross-channel cannibalization is when the marketing costs/efforts of one marketing channel are not considered because a different marketing channel is being given credit for them. This impacts both budget allocation and proper allocation of costs. Since social media buzz often serves to uplift other marketing efforts they are most impacted by improper allocation.For example, a social media click originating from a Twitter focused campaign refers a customer to the site but a coupon affiliate closes the sale by providing a coupon to the customer. In a “last cookie in” system only the affiliate in this example would get credit for the sale. In an ideal world both the first and last referrer of a customer would be cookied so that you would know which channel is referring new customers and which is closing them, thus properly giving credit to both channels and minimizing cannibalization. Awareness of the complexities of tracking multi-channel efforts is key in order to properly coordinate award of credit to all involved channels.

Final Thoughts

If you are managing a social media campaign or are a business eager to launch into social media, remember to embrace the numbers. Numbers are sexy -they help spot costs and inefficiencies you could avoid; help identify opportunities you could be missing; and often determine which budgets will be renewed.   The dollar signs are there, you just have to know where to look.

Read the original here:
Sexy Numbers: Measuring ROI in Social Media Campaigns

Affiliate marketing is receiving some not so great publicity…again. This time it comes from Rik Ferguson over at TrendMicro blog as he reveals a Facebook Account Upgrade Scam, where fan pages promote a Gold Facebook account upgrade. Of course, there is no such thing as a gold Facebook account.

From Rik Ferguson’s blog post (bolding by me for emphasis):

So what’s the point for the scammer? Well if you follow all the instructions, you first invite all your friends to come and check out this (cough) great deal. Then, if you are credulous enough to click the button, you are informed that in order to access the Account Upgrade page you must complete “1 quick, free survey”, different versions of the scam page offer different surveys, but this is where the money is made.

The survey I tested linked (via a couple of affiliate marketing services) to a “Werewolf vs. Vampire” quiz which promised to tell me which I am (surely I should know that already?) at the end of the ten questions I am invited to enter my mobile phone number to receive my results. If I do that I am agreeing to pay a £9.00 joining fee followed by £9.00 every week until I cancel my membership via SMS.

Of course, I immediately wanted to know which affiliate networks were involved considering TrendMirco’s report of around one million Facebook user’s being subscribed to the numerous fake gold account fan pages.

The Gory (Albeit Probably Boring) Details

Although, it was stated that the scam had been reported to Facebook and the content was most likely being removed, I got out my shovel and began digging. A quick Google search showed the content was being removed, but I was able to quickly pull up some of the offending pages courtesy of Google cache (see below).

The first thing I noticed was that the affiliate behind the fake Facebook upgrades appears to be geo-targeting the offers displayed to the end user. While Rik Ferguson obviously received UK cell phone offers, the offers displayed to me were US based offers (see below).

The actual offers differed at times, but all pretty much followed the same CPA network click stream. The irony of one of the quizzes being called “How Dumb Are You” was not lost on me.

The domain responsible for the above display on Facebook is corporate-promo-mfg.com. This domain was consistent throughout all of my research.

The affiliate link on corporate-promo-mfg.com is for CPALead with the publisher id 42109. Whois records for CPALead.com show the company as located in Wisconsin. The contact information on their web site indicates they are located in Las Vegas, NV.

CPALead redirects the click to click2go.org with an affiliate id of 3013 and sub id 42109 (passing the original publisher id). Click2go uses a Privacy Whois service, however the IP Location is tied to TattoMedia.

TattoMedia is certainly a player in these types of SMS ads and I’ve come across them numerous times in connection with adware usage. At this point, CPALead is acting as an affiliate/publisher of TattoMedia.

Click2Go then redirects the click to webventures.directtrack.com with the aff id CD43 and sub id 3013 (the id for CPALead as an affiliate with TattoMedia). Note that at this point, the original affiliate/publisher id is no longer being carried through on the actual tracking links. If you go to webventures.directtrack.com, you are brought to a sign-up page for MundoMedia.com. MundoMedia uses a Privacy Whois service as well, but their web site shows contact information for Toronto and Los Angeles.

MundoMedia  redirects the click to linktrack66.com containing the same aff id and sub id. Linktrack66.com is another tracking domain associated with MundoMedia.

Finally the click is redirected to MyMindQuizzes.com where the actual survey resides. MyMindQuizzes also uses a Privacy Whois service but resides on the same IP address as MundoMedia. Sometimes CPA networks will host a sign-up form for an advertiser on their own servers; other times it may be the CPA network themselves in ownership of the offer.  Looking at the Terms of Service page on MyMindQuizzes, I found mention of the company name Neo Image.

The short version is I found three CPA Networks involved in these deceptive Facebook ads: CPALead, TattoMedia and MundoMedia.

The Plot Thickens

You may be asking yourself “So what, the fraudulent ads were reported and Facebook removed the pages. It’s just a little bit of bad PR that will most likely quickly fade in people’s memory.”

If only that was case. The reality is that people who are making some nice change, regardless of how they are making it, aren’t always willing to give it up quickly. TrendMicro reported the incident on Monday. On Wednesday I did a search through Facebook (not Google but Facebook) and I found several new and active fake Facebook Gold Account fan pages with fan totals in the tens of thousands. When I viewed the profile pictures of one of these new accounts I saw pictures were added Monday. Even while Facebook was removing pages, new ones were evidently being set up.

Some of those pages are now gone, but I see new active pages again today with one simple search.

And while Facebook may be attempting to keep up the affiliate links involved remain active. There does not appear to have been any termination of the affiliate account by the CPA networks. Indeed, if you recall I went from a Google cached page on the account on Facebook to even track which CPA Networks were involved.

The Implications

There are several implications to this type of situation. The most obvious is  while the incidents were initially reported in the UK, they are now happening in the US as well. There is no way this ad promotion will meet the FTC guidelines regarding deceptive advertising practices. You don’t have to be a lawyer to figure that one out. When you start hitting numbers of consumers in the million plus range being potentially impacted, it’s almost like screaming for the FTC big stick to head your way. Everyone in the click stream trail is at legal risk.

What about those consumers? If you look at the last screen shot I posted, you’ll see that Facebook groups against this one particular scam are beginning to form. I’ll hazard a wild guess and say consumers aren’t happy about it either.

Is it a wonder that security companies tend to be less than affectionate towards affiliates? This type of activity certainly doesn’t help our case, particularly when they have seen affiliate links tied to scams, adware and the such for years now.  It should be noted that Rik Ferguson didn’t say “CPA Network affiliates”, he said “affiliate marketing”.

The lack of transparency build into the sub-affiliate model should be neither an inherent excuse nor a mechanism to hide behind when it comes to ensuring fraudulent activities do not tarnish and stain our whole industry. It’s not like we are talking about an affiliate who is capable of generating only a limited number of ad views.  If a network cannot monitor traffic from an affiliate at that level, then they probably shouldn’t be a network.  CPA Networks must become more active in establishing acceptable marketing practices, monitoring their programs and taking action on offenses within the industry and as an industry, we must be clear to those outside of our industry, including consumers, that these types of fraudulent marketing practices are unacceptable.

These types of incidents impact our industry as a whole and how we function and navigate within it.  Please stay tuned for Part Two of the post.

I wish that I could say “the end” but it’s not the end of story.  That’s will Part 2 of this post.

Go here to read the rest:
Black Hat Affiliate Tactics in the Facebook Era

The return-on-investment question always dogs proponents of social media marketing. Businesses want to, no, need to know the ROI of campaigns.  Will time spent on social networks mean more customers through the door and more money in the bank?

Researchers at Rice University feel the answer is yes. At least when it comes to Facebook fanpages.

According to the Harvard Business Review, a study by Rice University finds that social media marketing using fanpages on Facebook has a positive impact on customer loyalty and purchases.

Researchers Utpal Dholakia and Emily Durham followed the change in customer activity for one business, Dessert Gallery of Houston, Texas, as it went from no Facebook presence to an active one.

The study based its findings on surveys of more than 1,700 respondents over a three-month period. Dessert Gallery customers who become Facebook fans turned out to be the store’s best customers and increased their purchases after engaging with the store online

Speaking directly to ROI those who were Facebook fans spent 33 percent more than non-fans. Also Facebook fans had 41 percent greater psychological loyalty toward Dessert Gallery, which underlies the promise social media that connections are lasting ones that will continue to benefit the business long after the account has been set up.

But there are questions that this study leaves lingering.

First, whether the results are applicable to larger companies. Since small stores already have a more people-focused, flesh-and-blood relationship, they usually have some customer loyalty to build from. Large “faceless” corporations may have tougher times building loyalty and also face customer service problems often exacerbated by their own redtape (see Lois Whitman debacle or the recent Kevin Smith vs Southwest saga as shining examples).

Secondly, will this small business be able to keep up and sustain the social media interaction it had at launch which enticed the customers to begin with. According to the article, the Facebook page was updated several times a week with photos, promotions and contests. Is that manageable for the internal staff over the long haul?

“We must be cautious in interpreting the study’s results,” Dholakia said. “The fact that only about 5 percent of the store’s 13,000 customers became Facebook fans within three months indicates that Facebook fan pages may work best as niche marketing programs targeted to customers who regularly use Facebook. Social-media marketing must be employed judiciously with other types of marketing programs.”

The promise of social media marketing has always been that conversations with engaged customers would have some real-world reward – let alone a reputation, by amplifying the impact of word-of-mouth. Now, in at least one case, that has proven to be true.

Read the original here:
Rice Study Gives Facebook Fanpages a Passing Grade

The Winter Olympics kicked off just days ago in Vancouver, Canada. As always, the primary media coverage is traditional television, but there’s a new and essential spin this year – social media.

As Alexandra Samuel points out in her blog for Harvard Business Review,  the Winter Olympics is “a living social media experiment.” While social media was used during the Summer Games in Beijing, “this is the first time it will be deployed in a free and democratic regime,” says Samuel.

Social media is having an impact that goes beyond the Olympics Games themselves. For example, the city of Vancouver became a hotbed of social media activity well before the games even started. Vancouver’s local media coverage of the Olympics has also changed dramatically, according to Samuel. Citizen journalists, she says, “have provided an alternate – and often critical – take on the Games.” Linda Solomon, publisher of the Vancouver Observer, an online news magazine that recruited over 150 contributors, tells Samuel, “It’s not about crafting a story anymore, which is an art that takes many years to master. It’s about telling what you see and think, something anybody can do. This levels the playing field.”

Another area that is depending heavily on social media is the “Cultural Olympiad” – an entire series of multi-disciplinary festivals running before, during, and after the Games. The Cultural Olympiad showcases Canadian and international music, dance, theatre, visual arts, and film.

In addition to making early use of Twitter and Facebook, the Cultural Olympiad launched Canada CODE, a giant digital project that, for a year before the Olympics, provided Canadians with an online platform for “connecting, creating and collaborating” with the people of the world to present “an ever-evolving portrait” of Canadians. The culmination of CODE is an invitation to enter the “Virtual Stadium” and upload a personal photo for a chance to be a virtual part of the Olympics Closing Ceremony.

The International Olympics Committee has had to deal with the impact of social media by establishing regulations for its use. The IOC allows athletes to use Twitter, Facebook and other social media tools as well as blogs, but requires that they limit any posts to personal experiences. “You can’t act as a journalist if you aren’t,” said Bob Condron, director of media services for the United States Olympic Committee. “You need to do things in a first person way.” Athletes are also forbidden to reference any sponsor or advertiser that is not an official Olympic partner. Condron told Wired, “These are going to be the Twitter Olympics.”

Whatever happens during the Olympics, it seems clear that social media has changed the ground rules. Says Samuel, “On the one hand, the Olympic narrative of global community seems like a natural fit for social media… On the other hand the complexity and business model behind the Games make the prospect of grassroots storytelling a huge challenge.”

Read the rest here:
Winter Olympics a Test Case for Power of Social Media

The launch of Google Buzz is just the latest piece of the social networking puzzle the search giant is assembling. But just what is Google up to?

With the much-hyped launch of Google Wave in 2009, it appeared Google was poised to turn online communication on its head with a whole different type of interface, but now it appears that Google has moved on to something more similar to Twitter and Facebook.

This is about taking advantage of social media adoption and defending its supremacy from encroachment of social networks. The jury is still out on just how successful Google has been in emulating Twitter and Facebook’s functionality.

First, a little bit about the new features: Buzz allows users of Gmail to update their status, have conversations, share photos and links, and sync up with Twitter and Facebook. It also enables them to follow others users, either from their contact list or by discovery through a search of all Buzz mentions.

While Google Buzz adoption may not challenge the behemoth of Facebook or the increasingly popular Twitter on their own terms, it may prove to be a helpful tool for businesses which have “gone Google.” Google has been increasing its marketing efforts for businesses to adopt its applications, including mail, documents and collaborative calendars.

So Buzz could be the next step in collaborative, in-the-cloud work as more of a competitor for in-house microblogging and conversation sites like Yammer.

“We designed Buzz to make it easy to connect with others and have conversations about things that interest you, and it’s great to see millions of you doing this already,” Google wrote in its blog. “It’s still early, and we have a long list of improvements on the way. We look forward to hearing more suggestions and will continue to improve the Buzz experience with user transparency and control top of mind.”

What Google could be doing is floating Buzz to the public right now and then, like it has with its Gmail and Google Calendar functions, offering a secured functionality to business customers which makes Ning an indirect target. The open format of Buzz at this point is helping Google sort out some of its issues, with tweaks already happening only days after its launch. One positive for Google is the speed Buzz is already being used.

“According to Google, its Buzz service already has more than nine million posts and comments. Remember, this is a service that launched on Tuesday, meaning that it’s getting more than 160,000 comments and posts per hour. That’s a staggering, staggering number,” wrote Ben Parr on Mashable.com.

Where is Google going with all of this? Maybe it will build up Buzz to be a threat to Facebook, Twitter, or Ning. Or maybe it is simply a slight of hand to take the public focus off Wave as it builds it up. Then again maybe Buzz will simply just wind up being another Orkut.

Here is the original:

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.

View original post here:
Who Dat? Not Pepsi

The recent attack on RockYou.com’s database opened many people’s eyes to a number of security flaws that exist on even some of the more popular web sites. To begin with, the RockYou social network’s database was susceptible to a Structured Query Language (SQL) injection exploit.

According to Jeremiah Grossman of WhiteHat Security, at least “16 percent of websites are vulnerable to SQL Injection” so while sad, it is not surprising. Jeremiah also sites Verizon’s Data Breach Incident Report (DBIR), which says that “SQL injection attacks, cross-site scripting, authentication bypass and exploitation of session variables contributed to nearly half of the cases investigated that involved hacking.”

More shocking is that the user account data that was stolen was stored in clear text – plain text that has not been encrypted. For a site as large as RockYou, this is unacceptable. Still, it is not the most frightening thing that is exposed by this attack.

When igigi, the hacker responsible for the attack, harvested over 32 million username and password combinations from the site, the passwords – not the usernames – were posted online for all to see. After the collection of passwords was analyzed by the Imperva Application Defense Center, the results were a bit astonishing.

Password findings

After looking at the collection of passwords, it was found that:

• 30 percent of users chose passwords whose length is equal to, or below six characters
• Roughly 60 percent of passwords came from a limited set of alpha-numeric characters
• Almost 50 percent of users used names, slang words, dictionary words or trivial passwords (consecutive digits, adjacent keyboard keys, etc)

And what were the most common passwords? The following table shows the top ten passwords in the first column. The second column shows the number of users who selected that as their password.

According to their findings, Imperva reported that in 17 minutes an attacker could compromise 1000 different accounts using a brute-force password cracking tool.

“Everyone needs to understand what the combination of poor passwords means in today’s world of automated cyberattacks: with only minimal effort, a hacker can gain access to one new account every second — or 1000 accounts every 17 minutes,” said Amichai Shulman, CTO of Imperva.

Combine this with the findings from the British firm Trusteer that “73 percent of Internet bank clients share online banking password with non-financial sites, and 47 percent re-use both their online banking user name and password” and you have a potential for disaster.

Strong passwords

While there is no excuse for the mistakes made by RockYou, any efforts made by them to protect their database would do nothing to prevent a brute-force attack from cracking some of these passwords in a matter of mere seconds.

To make things more difficult on attackers looking to steal your passwords, a few basic rules need to be followed:

• A password must be at least 8 characters
• A password needs to consist of at least 4 different types of characters – upper case letters, lower case letters, numbers, and special characters
• A password should not be a name, a slang word, or any word in the dictionary. It should not include any part of your name or your e-mail address

A common complaint about the strong password requirements is that they are impossible to remember. After all, Aghe83#Qs@ can be quite difficult to rattle off when logging in first thing in the morning. Rather than writing down a complex password like this on a post-it note stuck to the monitor, opt for a passphrase. HisBirthd@yisJune12 is pretty easy to remember and it abides by all three of the strong password rules.

See the original post here:
RockYou is Latest Reminder Not to Neglect Your Passwords

It can be said that Jason Calacanis picks ventures that grow, even if he often doesn’t know what they do. Social shopping company ThisNext is no exception. Calacanis, who currently serves on their board and was an early financial backer, but still doesn’t seem to know that affiliate marketing is one of their monetization methods.

Nevertheless, despite such lack of clarity ThisNext continues to grow, announcing today that they have acquired competitor Stylehive for an undisclosed amount. Boasting 60,000 members Stylehive’s caters to a more female audience with products centering on the fashion and beauty markets.

The announcement also heralds the establishment of umbrella company Curatemedia that both companies will operate under. Prior to the acquisition ThisNext closed a Series C round of funding for $1.2 million dollars. The capital will be used to develop additional shopping tools, facilitate commerce functionality and to fuel the growth of Curatemedia into new verticals and categories.

They do have some heavy competition in the “social shopping” sphere with such sites as CNET Reviews, Kaboodle and Stylefeeder which was recently acquired by Time Inc. That of course is without taking into account the shopping that occurs on social networks like Facebook. Obviously this growth in social shopping proves CEO and Co-founder of Like.com Munjal Shah wrong when he stated that visual search was killing social search. That battle appears to be far from over.

Read the original post:
ThisNext Picks Up Stylehive

In the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) world, when Procter & Gamble (P&G) makes a move, every one of its competitors take notice. That’s because P&G is the world’s branding powerhouse, owner of 300 brands with such legendary names as Crest, Gillette, Ivory and Tide.

P&G has long been known as a marketing innovator. The company was, of course, among the first sponsors of “soap operas,” but more recently, P&G has used every media imaginable to relentlessly push its brands. That’s why it’s more than curious that P&G has been somewhat late to the social media party.

In fact, in November 2008, Ted McConnell, P&G’s general manager of interactive and innovation, told a conference in Cincinnati, P&G’s hometown, that he was anything but enthusiastic about Facebook. “What in heaven’s name made you think you could monetize the real estate in which somebody is breaking up with their girlfriend? …I don’t think everything every consumer says to someone else and writes down is somehow monetizable by the media industry,” McConnell said.

My, Ted, how things have changed. Little more than a year later, P&G just announced that it has opened a Silicon Valley office specifically to “help develop social-networking systems and digital-marketing capabilities,” according to Advertising Age. Venture capitalist David Hornik, who met with P&G executives, reported that “P&G’s explicit goal for 2010 is to assure that each of its brands has a meaningful presence on Facebook, and they are willing to pay dearly for that. …[P&G leaders] view Facebook as a must-have for digital advertising and brand building.”

When P&G does anything, it does it in a very big way, so this latest move is clearly signaling that social media is to be taken seriously by P&G – and therefore by the whole marketing industry, which follows its every move.

Interestingly, on the very same day that the P&G story broke, Advertising Age also  reported that Clorox (a P&G arch-rival) was seeking a full-time in-house legal counsel to focus on social media. This is yet another sign of how important social media has become to big marketers. A Clorox spokesman told Advertising Age:

“Social-media channels are a growing focus for consumer communication and stakeholder engagement for our brands and company. As a newer communication channel, the application of existing laws to this medium is evolving. For those reasons and the rapid pace of communication in the Web 2.0 world, we’re seeking an attorney to focus on social media as well as talent rights.”

Maybe it doesn’t seem like such big news to hear that Procter & Gamble and Clorox are finally focusing on social media, but it matters. These guys are now drinking the social media Kool-aid. When you see companies of this size and stature going full-speed ahead with the likes of Facebook, you know mass adoption of Facebook as a business marketing medium for all CPG companies, and all marketers for that matter, is just around the corner.

Read the original post:
P&G Finally Embraces Facebook