How To Avoid Downfalls Of Social Campaigns

Kevin Barenblat has a 5 step program to keep your social campaign on track:

1: Set quantitative goals and measure them.

2: Consider alternatives to custom application development.

3: Make sure you're building for today's platform.

4: Save some budget for user seeding.

5: Add complexity over time.

All the details here

RotoHog Partners With GoDaddy For Facebook Game

RotoHog.com, a fantasy sports operator and developer for major brands, media companies and professional sports leagues, has tapped GoDaddy.com to sponsor a new Pro Football Playoff Fantasy Football Game on Facebook.

Hut hut hike

More Ad Products To Come from MySpace

MySpace has introduced a flurry of new applications and services as it transforms into an advertising-supported social portal, chasing the big bucks spent on Yahoo and Google's YouTube. It is aggressively leveraging its 75 million active monthly users, each with about 111 friends and spending an average of four hours monthly in ways that Madison Avenue and Hollywood cannot ignore. When you can claim nearly 12% of all Internet minutes in the U.S., people will listen. Jeff Berman, MySpace president of sales and marketing, discussed future plans with MediaPost.

The interview

Google's Ad Model for Friend Connect, OpenSocial Widgets

Sites registered with Google's Friend Connect will soon be able to include AdSense-like advertising onto their sites and in Open Social widgets. This gives Google a window to shoehorn more advertising onto third party websites.

Friend Connect lets websites incorporate social features — like Twitter-style chat, and the ability to embed and share content on MySpace or Facebook — onto their pages. Users can log in once to participate in communities across a multiplicity of destinations.

Publishers will receive a cut of revenue from ads that appear within Friend Connect and Open Social widgets. According to TechCrunch, this business model earned Friend Connect the nickname "FriendSense" within the Googleplex.

More here

Facebook Extends App Invites To Non-Members

Facebook has begun allowing members to send application invites to friends who are not already using the social network. The move is aimed at boosting both the growth of Facebook apps and its user base.

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Study: Almost 10% On Social Networks Via Mobile

The proportion of U.S. mobile subscribers who access social networks on their cell phones nearly tripled to almost 10% over a year ago, according to a consumer study by The Kelsey Group and ConStat spotlighted Monday by eMarketer.

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Google Pursues Patents to Monetize Social Networks

The US Patent and Trademark Office published a handful of patent applications from Google, betraying the search giant's ambition to monetize social networks.

More about the Do No Evil's schemes

MySpace v. Facebook Advertising Showdown. Which Platform Is Better?

Ryan Hupfer at Hubpages advertises on both MySpace and Facebook. He recently compared the two platforms. In a nutshell, he finds Facebook a much better experience. When it comes to the results, though, things are mixed. Ryan’s test showed a lower cost per click on MySpace than Facebook ($.27 v. $.44). But the Facebook clicks were more productive: a new user cost just $5.11 on Facebook, v. $8.03 on MySpace.

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Paramount Pulls Campaign On Artsy Social Network

Paramount Pictures pulled a contest scheduled to run this week aimed at promoting the January release of DreamWorks's "The Uninvited" after the press got wind of the agreement and the studio lost control of marketing plans, according to sources close to the deal.

DeviantART has a community of 8 million contributing artists who submit 100,000 works daily. The Los Angeles-based site has built a database of 70 million works of art since 2000. Topics span 2,400 genres.

Many of the member artists have supported successful viral campaigns and contests for PepsiCo, Sony, Scion and gaming site Three Rings through their artwork. The works become viral by sharing the embed code through widgets on other social media sites and profiles.

More here

Facebook Continues Torrid Growth

Facebook is growing faster than ever, especially overseas. Active users on the social network have hit 140 million, according to new data released by the company this week.

More on this growing story

Facebook In The News

Unofficial Facebook blog AllFacebook launched a demographic widget that enables marketers to review comparative Facebook statistics in charts format. They also launched an analysis tool for Facebook Apps.

Here

Facebook new growing by over 600,000 users a day, and could reach 200 million active users by March. There are also lots of engagement stats in the article here.

Advertisers Face Hurdles on Social Networking Sites

The NY Times takes a look at advertisers efforts on Facebook, including P&G, and finds out things aren't going as well as planned. Some reasons are offered, and some advice dished out.

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Are Social Networks Sinking?

The economic downturn and uncertain business plans could result in an industry-wide shakeout.

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eMarketer Again Lowers Social-Net Projection

For the second time this year, online ad industry authority eMarketer has lowered its spending estimate for social-networking advertising for 2008 to $1.2 billion, down from the $1.4 billion benchmark set in May -- which itself was down from an earlier spend estimate of $1.6 billion.

Officials at eMarketer said the decision to lower its spending estimates for the segment was driven by the overall poor ad economy and weak performance by MySpace, which saw its revenue projection for 2008 drop by $170 million (from $755 million to $585 million) versus the company’s May numbers. Rival social network Facebook’s revenue estimate also dropped from $265 million to $210 million, indicating that the still unproven ad medium is gaining traction at a slower rate than once expected. Overall, MySpace and Facebook account for 70 percent of social media ad dollars, according to eMarketer.

More here

Online Social Networking And The Economic Crisis

In the fallout of the global financial meltdown, it's difficult to think of a positive side to the economic crisis. But it actually might be good news for Web 2.0 social networking.

Here's why.

Social Features Beef Up Bebo — and AOL — Value Add

This morning AOL launched a revamped version of social network Bebo, replete with social features that suggest relevant content and track the activities of "friends."

Heavy Bebo users will now be served recommended content, based on past activity, stated interests and the interests and activities of friends. Recommendations can include videos, music, groups and games. AOL reportedly built its content recommendation engine from the ground up.

More here

MySpace Exec: Marketers Should Embrace Fan Sites

A MySpace executive suggested Tuesday that using lawyers to shut down unauthorized, consumer-generated fan sites on the social network is a grave mistake. Instead, marketers should look to engage the creators and turn them into brand evangelists.

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Facebook Crowns Top Apps.

Facebook bequeathed five $250,000 awards to top Facebook apps from a group of 25 finalists (who each had already won $25,000).

Winners included GroupCard, Kontagent, MouseHunt and Wildfire among others.

More here

Apps: The Newest Brand Graveyard

So far, Facebook apps from brands like Coca-Cola, Champion, Ford and Microsoft are as popular as desolate Second Life islands.

Discover why here.

Facebook Closing In On MySpace.

Facebook is rapidly closing the gap with US socnet leader MySpace, according to Compete. Facebook blossomed to 49.4 million visitors between November 2007 and November 2008, wile MySpace dropped down to 56.4 million visitors.

See actual chart.

How to Use Social Networking Sites for Marketing and PR

The New York Times provides some helpful tidbits on advertising on LinkedIn.

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Power.com: One Ring to Rule All Social Networks?

With what looks to be a fair amount of fanfare, a company virtually unknown in the U.S. is aiming to disrupt the fast-growing social networking business. Tonight, Rio de Janeiro-based Power.com, which already boasts 5 million registered users, is coming out of relative stealth to offer a way to view all your social networks and synchronize your friends, updates, photos, and everything else on all of them. The company’s tagline: “All your friends is one place.”

More here

Facebook Connect: Scary But Good

Facebook Connect, the technology that lets its members sign onto third-party sites with their Facebook identification, has just gone live. This allows people to bring profile information, friends, photos, events, and groups to participating sites.

It seems Facebook could use information posted by its users to help other sites deliver more targeted ads. Likewise, those sites could tell Facebook what its members are doing elsewhere, helping make its own ads more targeted.

CNET has their thoughts on the matter.

One of the companies adopting Facebook's new log-in system, Facebook Connect, is CBS, parent company of CNET and publisher of Webware. I'm glad we're on board with this program, even if I do feel it's a bit of Faustian deal.

Here's why.

MySpace CEO Cautiously Optimistic On 2009

MySpace can grow advertising revenue in 2009, its chief executive said, even as the economic crisis erodes big media companies' bottom lines.

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If You’re On MySpace Now, You’re A [expletive] Cretin.

Businessweek's Jon Fine interviews the author of a Rubert Murdoch bio, and argues with him over the value and prospects of MySpace.

More censored language here

Social Web’s Big Question: Federate or Aggregate?

A sharp increase in the number of web services and social networks has many of us yearning for a single sign-on, which has led to the idea of “federation.” On the flip side, we also want one place to manage our diverse web services in one place — in other words, aggregation. These two diametrically opposed views of how we are going to come to grips with our social web are going to face an intense debate until consumers vote with their clicks.

The debate rages on