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Drew McLellan of Drew’s Marketing Minute has put together a concise cheat-sheet for CMOs looking to understand how to leverage social media platforms in support of their brands. Color-coded for easy reading: Green represents opportunity and red equals waste of time.
I’m thrilled that the IAB and 4As have rolled out Version 3.0 of the standard terms and conditions for online advertising. The two sections I love the most: One, that v3.0 addresses auction-based ad platforms such as Google’s AdWords and Digg’s Digg Ads. Two, indemnity for publishers and platforms — like Digg, Facebook, Twitter, Google and Yahoo — where some of the content is links to other publishers’ content.
Make the move, agency friends!
Two articles and a post at Digg’s blog this week all discuss the progress of Digg Ads, the Digg-able, bury-able ad units on Digg’s homepage.
Mashable describes the Digg Ads product better than I do:
“DiggAds is powered by a complex auction-based system that attempts to serve users with the highest quality ads — Digg assigns its own quality score to ads — while factoring in the advertiser’s bidding price. It’s like Google Adsense but with quality scoring. The idea is to reward high quality ads with lower CPCs; the more diggs an ad gets the less the advertiser pays.”
Bob Buch on Digg’s blog says:
“In the first four months, DiggAds has been extraordinarily successful for Digg. From a revenue perspective, things have been great — we view this as a positive sign that giving users control over the advertising they see is a good user experience.”
And Liz Gannes at GigaOM says:
“Social networking behavior — endless repetitive page views, unvetted content — isn’t a great fit for traditional forms of online advertising. Early attempts to bring search or brand ads onto sites like MySpace and Facebook had pathetic results compared the trajectories of the sites’ popularity and attention. But now, a few years in, social media companies are starting to discover how to advertise to their own audience. And in the last five months, Digg has figured out a model that makes sense. So much so that its new site-specific ad formats already account for more than a third of its revenue.”
(Liz interviewed me for the article.)
“[A year ago] a Pew Internet and American Life Project study found that 20% of online adults 45-54 years old (the ‘younger’ Boomers) and 10% of online adults 55-64 (the ‘older’ Boomers) were participating in social networks…. Boomers are, in fact, joining and participating in social networks. Deloitte late last year found that 46% of Boomers maintain at least one social networking profile — up significantly from 2007. “
Full story at MediaPost.
I want to win a street that I can rename @ChasNote!
Above is a street in Palestine named after the Twittter handle of a non-profit patron. That and other examples of offline extensions of social-media ad campaigns at urlesque. ???? ????? ??????? ???
We’re now spending 17% of our online time with social networking sites, up from 6% last August. From Read/Write Web:
“According to new figures from Nielsen, the amount of time spent surfing social networking and blogging sites had tripled since last year, suggesting ‘a wholesale change in the way the Internet is used,’ says Jon Gibs, VP of media and agency insights at the company’s online division….”
As a result:
“Even as companies decreased their overall ad expenditures, they increased their spend on top social networks and blogs — up 119% from last year. ($108 million in August 2009 up from $49 million in August 2008). And when broken down by category, the increases are even more dramatic. The entertainment industry, for example, has increased spending by 812% year-over-year on social network sites and the travel industry increased spending by 364%.”
(Thanks, Dave!)
Last month (see The Importance of Sharing) a few online publishers announced that social-media sharing platforms have become bigger sources than Google for referral traffic — those site visitors who click on links rather than typing a site’s URL into a browser from memory. Web 2.0 and VC blogger Fred Wilson says he gets more traffic from Twitter than from Google. One PC Mag writer published server logs that indicate Digg drives much more traffic to their tech stories than Google. And Twitter itself gets more traffic from Facebook than from search (Compete data here).
So it’s no surprise that social-media optimization — including integrated buttons and widgets that make sharing easier — is a growth activity across the online publishing sector. Earlier this week Adweek reported on Time.com’s experience with Digg optimization. (Disclosure: I work for Digg.). Time replaced its generic “share” button with a widget that pulls together recent Time stories that have been Dugg, ranked in order of most to least Diggs.
According to Time.com’s general manager, John Cantarella, the integrated approach increased traffic from Digg to Time by 164%. Time stories now end up on Digg’s homepage more than 100 times a month, up from 55 before the widget integration. The article cites other publishers (such as Newsweek and Wired) taking the same approach, with similar results. Telegraph UK experienced an eleven-fold increase in traffic from Digg after deploying the widget.
Ben Straley, CEO of Meteor Solutions, piled on yesterday in his Mediapost column, Sharing Is the New Advertising. First he added a few more names to the list of publishers for whom “sharing sites” are rivaling or beating out search for referral traffic: “Etsy recently reported that Twitter is the third-highest source of traffic to their site, and according to a Hitwise study, PerezHilton receives more of his traffic from Facebook than any other source.”
Brands such as Microsoft and Alaska Airlines (both Meteor clients, apparently) are jumping in, too.
“After working with lots of companies to do this type of measurement and analysis, we’ve uncovered some surprising results: namely that sharing drives significantly more traffic than search in some cases. On average, we’ve found that between 15-20% of unique visitors to the sites we’re tracking come by way of shared links, and there is a consistent left in conversion rates among visitors from this source….”
In one case he references, “the visitors that came to the site via shared links were1.5x more likely to convert than visitors that came from other sources including search.” Impressive data.
Josh Bernoff summarizes topline findings from Forrester’s 3rd annual social-media audience study, The Broad Reach of Social Technologies.
Two things stand out for me.
1. More than 80% of the US internet population is at least consuming content created by or distributed by social media platforms.
2. Nearly a quarter of the US internet population actively creates (blogs or publishes into services such as Twitter) or actively curates (a group Forrester calls “Collectors” who help aggregate or re-organize content via platforms like Digg).
Both are staggeringly big populations.
“We no longer search for news, the news finds us.”
More and more, that statement appears to be true. Twitter gets more traffic from Facebook than Google. VC blogger Fred Wilson sees the same. And for PC Mag, it’s Digg over Google.
More on the above quote plus a universe of social media stats in 4 minutes:
(Thanks, Mac!)
From Mediapost The Last Seduction movie full :
“In order to effectively engage ‘empowered women’ online, consumer packaged goods brands must design campaigns that enhance communication and aid in consumers’ decision-making and influence. And that, according to a new report by Forrester Media, means social media.”
The Forrester report suggests that purchase decisions by these women are being affected by the content and conversations they’re having online.
“Empowered women — or those ages 25-54 who feel that the Internet helps them manage their family life — are highly influential as household decision-makers as well as among their peers. From entertainment to electronics, empowered women are much more likely to be asked by friends for product recommendations.”