GigaOM » Social Media Advertising

Social third-quarter 2012: analysis and outlook

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 06:55:54 +0000

Social media technologies continue to permeate marketing and enterprise collaboration, even if investors felt let down in the third quarter by their consumer-facing businesses like Facebook, Groupon, and Zynga. So B2B technology offerings in support of marketing and collaboration will soon steal all the social tech attention. This quarterly wrap-up analyzes these events, and provides a near-term outlook for trends, technologies and companies to watch in the next 18 to 24 months.

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Readers weigh in: future prospects for Twitter

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 17:14:36 +0000

Twitter is a mainstream communications technology that plays a critical role in news and content discovery. The company has spawned a business ecosystem of third-party developers and services that create apps and data analysis. But as it evolves its business model, Twitter has also generated controversy around its changing developer and user policies. Twitter feels like it is at a crossroads, so GigaOM Pro took a quick pulse of the tech community’s opinions on the company’s future prospects, its likely business model, and its role in the overall technology industry. The results are presented here, with analysis.

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Social marketing platform Unified gets more Yammer-like

Ki Mae Heussner — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 17:15:40 +0000

As Microsoft’s $1 billion acquisition of Yammer showed us, there’s an appetite for social media products tailored for the enterprise. And with several new enhancements rolled out Wednesday, Unified wants to be even more of an enterprise-grade communication and social operating platform specifically for marketers.

Launched in January, Unified offers cloud-based technology to help brands and agencies execute social campaigns on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and other social channels through a centralized dashboard. Its “social operating platform” is like a one-stop-shop for social media advertising that streamlines each step of the process — from planning, buying and optimizing campaigns to analyzing earned media and determining returns on the investment. Last month, the company said it raised $14 million in a round led by Advance Publications Inc., the company that owns Condé Nast Publications.

On Wednesday, the company released an updated version of the platform that layers on a Yammer-like user experience to the workflow specific to a brand or agency executing multiple social media campaigns.

With the new version, everyone from the campaign manager to the CMO can communicate about new campaign dates, data sets, creative content, comments and more, as well as manage tasks and receive Facebook-like notifications for the information most relevant to them.

“The one thing we wanted to take into consideration was serving up the right information to the right people,” said Jason Beckerman, co-founder and chief product officer.

The latest version also makes it easier for brands to see the global picture of all of their marketing campaigns (from those on social media to more traditional TV campaigns) and monitor how they’re interacting, as well as visualize all the relevant datasets (from those showing campaign performance to those revealing social media commentary about campaigns) in one place.

The company also released Amplet, a new app that allows an advertiser or publisher to turn banner ads, landing pages and other kinds of web content into shareable and trackable content. For example, Beckerman said a recent client was able to work with a set of bloggers and turn specific parts of their posts into content visitors could tweet and it allowed the client to track the virality with more granularity. Unified said Amplet was the first of more apps developed by the company and third parties. Considering that the company’s latest investor owns Condé Nast’s glossy titles it’s reasonable to assume that web content for those magazines could soon start adopting this technology.

Since launching, the company has managed more than than 3,000 campaigns for more than 200 brands, and has added several new executives from the enterprise and marketing communities. Social media management platforms, such as Buddy Media and Vitrue, also let brands manage their social campaigns, but Unified’s pitch is that it focuses on paid and earned media and provides a more comprehensive platform.

(Image by naraytrace via Shutterstock.)

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New Facebook ad offerings fill some holes

David Card — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 15:51:37 +0000

Facebook needed to change the way it sold advertising inventory and add some glitzier formats. Last week, at its fMC event for marketers, it made some progress towards addressing those needs. Let’s see what Facebook is doing right and where it still has holes.

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Digital won’t “evaporate” ad dollars

David Card — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 14:00:37 +0000

A new survey has revived the fear that digital ad spending will shrink the overall pie. While newspapers have it tough, other big ad markets are still pretty healthy, and technologies like targeting and social media advertising could still increase the value of — and thus spending on — both digital and traditional media.

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NewNet Q3: Facebook remakes headlines in social media

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 07:01:28 +0000

Last quarter’s big headline in social media and real-time technologies came from Google, which launched Google+, its first social tech product that seems legit. In the third quarter, things were back to normal. Google+ is still growing, but Facebook’s platform update dominated the news. And as Google+ passed 25 million users and won some raves from the digerati, its competition with Facebook intensified. Additional companies mentioned in this report include Zynga, Salesforce, BranchOut and Foursquare. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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The social-media advertising ecosystem is shaping up

David Card — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 20:00:07 +0000

A recent batch of product and funding announcements points to a real trend: the infrastructure and business ecosystem for social media advertising is developing rapidly. That’s good news for marketers – and even for Facebook competitors – as it is critical for growing the market beyond the $3 billion forecast for U.S. spending in 2011. Two critical areas are shaping up: social marketing management and advertising measurement,

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How to succeed on Broadway? Mix Facebook, fans and video

Ryan Lawler — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 22:23:23 +0000

The Broadway musical How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying is making a big marketing push on Facebook, with an innovative campaign to find the show’s biggest fan. The show, which stars Harry Potter‘s Daniel Radcliffe and Night Court‘s John Larroquette, hopes to drum interest with fan-generated video submissions.

The “Ultimate Fan” contest, which can be found at on the show’s website and its Facebook page, asks users to tell the producers why they are the show’s biggest fans. Those fans then get 20 seconds to record their best pitch. The contest winner will be flown to New York City to watch the show, meet the cast and take part in a video series highlighting the experience.

my attempt at being a super fan

Jim Glaub, creative director of How To Succeed‘s Ultimate Fan campaign, said the producers of the show were looking for ways to engage with and reward fans on Facebook. The contest was one way to do that. But of course, there’s also a marketing angle to the contest. “Besides being able to reward one lucky fan, there are benefits from a marketing standpoint,” Glaub said.

The genius in the campaign is that the show’s biggest fans are also its biggest evangelists: Videos from fans can be watched by other viewers on the How To Succeed page or on Facebook. By showing real people with real enthusiasm for the show, How To Succeed hopes to drum up even more interest from viewers who might be on the fence.

Not just that, but fans that have recorded their own testimonials can then share their videos with friends. Since the number one way that theater goers hear about a new show is through word of mouth, getting on people’s Facebook walls is one very easy way to spread the word.

The whole campaign is being managed by video startup VideoGenie, which provides a platform for companies to gather, manage, publish and analyze videos that are recorded by their fans. VideoGenie, which recently raised $2 million in venture funding, has run a ton of these types of campaigns so far, and claims that leveraging fan testimonials has been pretty effective for clients looking to better engage with their target audiences.

Take the Tony Awards for instance. In May, VideoGenie launched a campaign on the Tony Awards Facebook page, asking users to answer the question, “What Does Broadway Mean to You?” About 40 percent of all traffic from the campaign came from users clicking through videos that their friends had shared on their walls. The average viewer watched about a minute and 25 seconds of video content, which means on average they watched four separate testimonials. And each video shared, on average, sent 67 people to the Tony Awards site.

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Yahoo’s growth options dwindling

David Card — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 20:00:14 +0000

Yahoo is still the biggest online property in the U.S., with fairly sturdy content and communications assets, but its options for restoring growth are getting fewer. Yahoo must re-energize its business around video, a social advertising network and/or syndication, or sell itself to Microsoft or AOL, assuming they’re still interested.

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Yahoo growth options dwindle

David Card — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 15:35:00 +0000

Yahoo reported another disappointing quarter, with core revenues down 5 percent to just over $1 billion. Its display advertising business was up 5 percent, but it appears to be losing share to companies like Google and Facebook.

Yahoo is still one of the biggest online properties in the U.S., with fairly sturdy content and communications assets, but its options for restoring growth are getting fewer. If Yahoo cashed out its assets in China, it could use that money for other acquisitions and investments to bolster online advertising and gain a little social media momentum. If Yahoo can’t reenergize its business around video, a social advertising network and/or syndication, as I detail in my weekly update at GigaOM Pro (subscription required), I suppose it could try to sell itself to Microsoft or AOL, assuming they’re still interested.

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