According to Ad.ly CEO Walter Delph, the firm had trouble in the past obtaining steady revenue because many brands used it for a one-and-out campaign. Now, he said, Ad.ly has found a second form of income through licensing the company’s analytics platform — tools that can help brand track how mentions on Twitter and Facebook ripple down from a celebrity to their fans.

“We had an activation business, but we didn’t have a data management platform. Now, we do. … It’s a logical extension of the celebrity tweet business,” said Delph in an interview in San Francisco this week. Delph, who was formerly a SVP at News Corp’s Digitam Media division, added that Ad.ly now has more than 10 repeat customers and is on pace to generate around $5 million for the year.

Adly’s decision to turn towards licensing also amounts to an admission that the company is pivoting, and that basing a social media business solely on celebrities is not not viable. This is likely due to the fact that Twitter and Facebook mentions are typically wrapped up in a larger endorsement package — tales of a one-off tweet from Charlie Sheen selling for $9,500 are more the exception than the rule.

Delph also added that social media marketing is a challenge the platforms typically don’t convert into immediate sales.

“You can’t expect me to sell a truck right on Twitter,” said Delph, adding that Ad.ly in the past has done a poor job of explaining how to measure ROI from social media.

While the focus on its analytics tools provide a way to persuade marketers of the value of social media, the new stragegy could also make it hard for Ad.ly to stand out from the dozens of other firms that offer social media listening platforms for brands. In response, Delph said Ad.ly is distinct because it can not just monitor social media ROI but also “activate” it through the celebrity tweets.

Delph adds that the overall social endorsement business is getting stronger because of richer media capacity built into platforms like Twitter.

“If you can show anything beside written word, it’s worth much more. A photo brings 3-4 times the performance.”

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Key highlights in this report include:

• For publishers, the first step to monetizing something is to be able to measure it. The analytics tools now available make it possible to track the spread of content on social platforms closely.

• Until now there has not been a marketplace where those potential buyers and sellers of content could meet. Nor were there adequate tools to enable verifiable transactions between them. Tools like Cascade and Ricochet are helping put the foundations of such a market in place.

• Both publishers and licensees will need to seize the sort of ad hoc syndication opportunities that arise online and on social media networks. One of the major tasks facing publishers over the next three to five years will be to structure their repositories of content so they can be searched, sorted, customized, repackaged, and accessed in real time via standardized APIs.

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The company is launching a set of tools aimed at brands that want to measure social influence, and in many ways, this makes a lot of sense. While an average user might be curious about his or her reach on Twitter or Facebook, understanding this data is much more valuable to a business than a consumer, and likely something Klout will better be able to monetize.

The company explained in a blog post that it’s already begun measuring the social influence of brands through its Klout Perks program, but now it will target those businesses directly:

“Today, we are taking the data-driven intelligence we’ve developed over the years to begin a more measured march towardKlout for Business. Initially, Klout for Business will give businesses a complimentary set of analytics with pointed insights into how and where influencers are engaging with their brands in social media.

Businesses will be able to look at an easy-to-read dashboard that tells you, at-a-glance, whether you are engaging your influencers on the networks where they are most actively exerting their influence and on which Klout Score ranges you could stand to amp up your efforts. Most importantly, Klout can tell you which topics your audience influences others on, helping you maximize your content efforts to drive consideration for your brand.”

The company last tweaked the formula for its Klout scores in August 2012, and will now launch a specific page for businesses on Klout. Customers will gain access to a dashboard where they can monitor social interactions and communicate with customers.

Klout has been in business for almost five years, and it’s unclear that the company has converted average consumers — or even tech-savvy social-media addicts — into caring about their Klout scores or achieved real traction as a measuring stick for social influence. The company wrote in the blog post that it has acquired a vast amount of social data that it’s now ready to use for other purposes, but it’s possible the company has simply reached the limit of its own influence with consumers.

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The Prague-based company said its latest round of funding was led by Index Ventures and included participation from existing funder Earlybird Venture Capital. It follows a $2 million Series A round announced last fall.

Launched in 2009, Socialbakers works with brands, such as McDonald’s, Nestle and LVMH to measure the performance of their  social media campaigns (and compare their progress against rivals) on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Google+. The company says that more than a fifth of all Fortune 500 companies are Socialbakers clients.

The company, which has offices in London, San Franciso, Dubai, Sao Paulo and other international cities, said the new funding will help accelerate growth and build out new features on its platform.

In addition to the now-acquired companies mentioned above (and Salesforce’s Radian6), firms like Unified, Hearsay Social, Syncapse and others also provide social media analytics and optimization as part of their services.

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The redesign expands Vibrant Media’s in-text ads – which pop-out when people mouse over double-green underlined words in an online article – to “in-context” ads that also surface under relevant editorial images. The new strategy also includes additional visual cues for consumers to signal that an ad is about to pop up and a wider range of ad formats for marketers.

In an interview, Irvine said the redesign is meant to make Vibrant Media’s ads more transparent and interactive so that the company can win over consumers and, ultimately, advertisers.

“Consumers are becoming more demanding in their expectations about advertising – especially digital advertising,” she said. “They want control and choice with how they interact with ads and they would also like to see more engaging ads with higher production value.”

She also said that even though people are learning to ignore certain parts of a web page and fast-forward through TV commercials, through social media and other digital channels, users are also learning to interact with advertising.

As part of the redesign, users won’t just see double green lines under ad-enabled text, they’ll also see a new icon (a double-facing arrow) that Irvine said serves as an extra signal of an upcoming ad. After a user mouses over the ad-enabled text, they’ll first see a progress (or countdown) bar, which gives them an opportunity to disengage, before the ad opens. The process, Irvine emphasized, is user-initiated, as a user needs to hover over the text for a little under three seconds before it activates (in Europe, it’s three seconds).

The new design also features a full-screen rich media ad unit, called Mosaic, that includes branded videos and photos, social media commentary and the option for users to participate in social conversations.

Irvine said about 4 percent of users stay on the countdown bar to launch the video and then 40 to 50 percent of users complete viewing a 15 second spot.

Given consumer “banner blindness” and the ease with which Internet  users ignore web ads, Vibrant Media’s in-context ads certainly give brands a better shot of getting noticed. And their expansion in rich media makes plenty of sense given the growth in online video and social media marketing. The risk is that consumers could continue to find the in-context approach to be too obtrusive. The extra signals do give consumers extra time to stop an ad before it fully opens but, within three seconds, a consumer could still accidentally hover over ad-enabled text and feel annoyed by the extra activity on the screen.

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As my colleague Mathew Ingram recently wrote, the Post has been more innovative than many of its rivals with its new media projects. In addition to SocialCode, the company has launched the Trove news-recommendation service and a social reader app on Facebook. Don Graham, the company’s CEO and a member of Facebook’s board, has been vocal about going “where the readers are.”

Gannett purchased digital marketing company PointRoll in 2005 and social media tech company Ripple6 in 2008, but the addition of BLiNQ could help it make new headway in the emerging social media management space, which has recently seen heightened activity. In the past few months, Buddy Media, Vitrue, Involver and Wildfire have all been snapped by tech heavyweights Salesforce, Oracle and Google.

Gannett already has relationships with national and local advertisers through its many media properties, and according to TechCrunch the company has been working with BLiNQ for the past year.

Gannett Blog author Jim Hopkins says the reported acquisition could be one of the biggest ever signed by Gannett, with the other candidate being the reported $100 million the company paid for PointRoll. He also points out that in the company’s recent earnings call, CEO Gracia Martore said investments in “strategic initiatives” were expected to reach no more than $10 million to $15 million in the third quarter — although TechCrunch says the BLiNQ buy would be paid out over three to four years, with $23 million paid upfront.

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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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Advance Publications Inc., the company that owns Condé Nast Publications, contributed $10 million, with Silicon Valley bank providing $4 million. Andrew Siegel, Advance Publications’ SVP of strategy and corporate development, who previously led mergers and acquisitions for Yahoo, will be joining Unified’s board.

Launched in January, Unified offers cloud-based technology aimed at helping global brands and agencies execute desktop and mobile campaigns on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, StumbleUpon and other social services through a centralized dashboard. The company said its “social operating platform” streamlines each step of the process — from planning, buying and optimizing campaigns to analyzing earned media and determining returns on the investment — and includes the checks and balances, security and other features needed by enterprise clients.

“The enterprise as we know it… is now required to become the social enterprise,” said CEO and co-founder Sheldon Owen, adding that there hasn’t been an automated marketing platform that really meets the needs of CMOs and their agencies in managing their investment in social media. “We are solving that problem.”

Since launch, the platform has managed more than 3,000 campaigns for more than 200 brands, including Microsoft, Bloomberg and GE. The company has also hired 26 employees. With the new funding, it plans to continue innovation on its platform, recruit more engineering talent and expand its sales and marketing teams. Owen said they saw Advance Publications as a strategic investor because of Siegel’s individual experience, the company’s other investments in firms like Reddit, and the customer opportunity in working with the parent company of Condé Nast.

Unified’s new funding comes on the heels of announcements by Oracle and Salesforce that they are getting into social media marketing through their respective acquisitions of Vitrue and Buddy Media. Both deals mean new enterprise-grade social media management platforms targeting CMOs and indicate growing interest in the space. It’s expected that more acquisitions in social media marketing are on the horizon. Owen said he considers Adobe Social, which launched in March and combines Adobe’s Context Optional/Efficient Frontier acquisition with Omniture analytics technology, to be their biggest competitor at the moment.

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The update comes just days before Facebook’s big IPO and underscores how much social channels are changing the way marketers build awareness, engage audiences and prompt actions by consumers. Buddy Media says it managed 128 billion impressions in the first quarter of this year, up from 3 billion this time last year. The new updates are designed to keep Buddy Media among the leaders of social marketing software, which is used by eight of the world’s top ten advertisers.

Here’s a look at the updates:

• The universal social data API lets marketers pull all their data from their social media presences, conversations, ads and apps and then use it to feed into tools like Omniture to guide their interactive marketing efforts. They can use the collected insights to bolster sales and product development or improve their relationships with consumers.
• Marketers can now use universal conversion tracking across Buddy Media’s entire social marketing suite to see, in real time, which content is rising to the top. More than just likes and shares, marketers can now see which content is driving actions across their entire portfolio of content, from paid ads, apps and updates.
• With a new mobile application platform, marketers can now build native mobile social applications instead of translating content designed for a desktop. Brands can build their own apps such as galleries, polls, video players and form builders that are optimized for mobile. That’s good for mobile users who now get a less compromised experience when clicking on content.

Other improvements include the ability for brands to group associated content into one larger campaign and set goals for that campaign. There’s also Pinterest integration for the first time so brands can build out their experience on Pinterest using a new app from Buddy Media and re-use that content in other places such as their Facebook Page. Arts and crafts retailer Michaels is one of the first to use Buddy Media to integrate its Pinterest board with its Facebook Page.

Joe Ciarallo, VP of Communications for Buddy Media, told me the improvements should help accelerate the adoption of marketing via social channels. He said companies are increasingly getting comfortable reaching consumers via social but it requires a change in thinking. It’s less about what the platforms can do for the brands and more about what the brands can do for people and their community of followers. 

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