Social Spending

eMarketer has reduced its estimate for ad spending in social networks for this year. (from an estimated $1.6 billion spent on social network ads, to $1.4 billion). The pace of growth is also forecast to slow - it's still progressing, but not quite as quickly as they had thought previously.

In terms of destinations, Myspace continues to attract the biggest share, although Facebook is increasing its market share.

Interestingly, and despite the hype, widgets only accounted for $15m last year, and will continue to be relatively insignificant this year.

The reasons for this restatement? eMarketer blames two forces: the softening of the economy which has hit advertising in general.They also point out that even the leaders (Facebook and MySpace) have failed to develop a convincing ad revenue model.

Data To Go

An interesting post from Marshall Kirkpatrick - Towards a Value-Added User Data Economy. Marshall applies network theory to data portability to show that all companies will be better off if they all allow data to be ported in and out.

It seems to me that the ultimate outcome of the data portability evolutions will be the "Personal data store", wherein the individual becomes his/her own data broker, where we allow or disallow access to that data depending on our current circumstances. For example, if I were in the market for a new car, I might want to share some data elements with car companies - once I choose one, I take back my data. And, of course I can share elements of my core data with the different social networks of which I am a part, only the core data stays in my personal data store, peripheral data can live in the social network...

Measuring What Matters

Brian Morrissey in Adweek, this week advances the question "What is a friend worth?" A direct enough way of expressing the delicate balancing act between conversations and conversion.... As marketers increase their involvement in the social media space - how will they go beyond measuring engagement and get to measuring what matters, measuring those comments, tracks, discussions, topics, influencers etc that really drive business outcomes. It's a bit like the web analytics quandary - the greatest thing about the online space is the reams of available data, the worst thing is... you guessed it. The trick really is in not using the 44,000 reports that come out of the box with your analytics package and choosing the 3 that you need. My agency has developed an interesting way to tie social activity to search and site-side optimisation, much more to come on this.

And the quote of the day from the same article:

"Social media measurement is like radar. You can't fly a plane without radar. The question is how much radar do you need." Pete Blackshaw, CMO of Nielsen BuzzMetrics.

Everything & Nothing

A very interesting commentary from the Economist on AOL's purchase of Bebo - comparing the purchase to that a decade ago of Hotmail by Microsoft. And - challenging the economics of both.

Trending Up

Trendwatching.com has released it report on trends for 2008. Lots of good thought provoking ideas of how (already emerging/emerged) trends from premiumization to crowd-mining will develop over the next year...

Influence Marketing & The Sagrada Familia

I was lucky enough this week to be able at address 400 or so marketers from Europe at the Forrester Consumer Marketing forum in Barcelona (beautiful city). So apart from getting back to Europe for a bit which is always nice, my presentation and discussion afterwards focused on Influence Marketing. I discussed the consumer trends that are the "channel of me" and the "channel of us" and the need for marketers to give serious consideration to building constituents as opposed to focusing only on building customer databases. We discussed further how social media marketing and CRM are really expressions of the same desire - to better know and therefore better converse with your customers and future customers.

The Forrester blog is here...

The End Of Advertising As We Know It

A voluminous report from IBM gloomily predicts the end of the current advertising model. The core drivers of this according to IBM are:

• Attention is increasingly controlled by consumers as media consumption moves away from the TV and due to ad skipping/blocking technologies
• The rise of user generated content is enabling engagement marketing
• New channels and technologies are enabling measurement of advertising effectiveness for the first time
• The rise of exchanges is changing the way advertising is bought and sold

There is no doubt that allocation of ad spend against the evolved media consumption needs to change (and quickly). We spend 37% of our time as consumers watching TV - a whopping 32% of ad spend is allocated to that medium. On the other hand, we spend 29% of our time on the Internet, where the ad spend is around 8%... So much for engagement marketing, at least so far...

The Next 100 Years In Marketing Starts With A Press Release

Facebook and MySpace have both started to use profiles and community membership to target ads to their member base. Both are likely to suceed but for different reasons... MySpace's massive membership (growing at 5 million a month) and their innovative SelfServe system gives them enormous scale and a local footprint. Facebook is actively encouraging members to subscribe to a brand, so people who actually really like a brand can make a public endorsement of it and share it through their networks, brands can leverage the already established and trusted social relationships.
Here's an extract from the Facebook press release (the full release is here...):

Today, Facebook Ads launched with three parts: a way for businesses to build pages on Facebook to connect with their audiences; an ad system that facilitates the spread of brand messages virally through Facebook Social Ads™; and an interface to gather insights into people’s activity on Facebook that marketers care about. ...
Advertising messages will gain distribution through what Facebook has termed the “social graph,” the network of real connections through which people communicate and share information. When people engage with a business’ Facebook Page, that action will spread information about that business through the social graph.

Facebook's CEO prefaced his recent remarks at the New York ad:tech conference by saying modestly "the next hundred years will be different for advertising, and it starts today."

Having the Haystack Help Find The Needle

How advertising and marketing services agencies have changed:

• From brand and product centric to customer centric
• From a focus on awareness to a richer one on advocacy
• From shouting (even targeted shouting) to listening
• From artisanal to tech-savvy
• From intuitive to analytical
• From standalone to holdings to a networked eco-system

This (yet to be fully realised) vision is about better listening to and therefore better understanding the consumer and broader groups of consumers. Ultimately it is about, having the haystack that is the community help you find the needle.

More Than Just Advertising

A very interesting article from AdAge discusses the (inevitable) move towards using social networks for CRM activities rather than simple display advertising - however well targeted it may be. It makes absolute sense to allow marketers to enter into conversations with users on these networks designed for multi-level conversations.


As the article points out - getting the model for this right is somewhat trickier than your average media buy. WalMart has a group on Facebook with more engagement opportunities than your average text ad, but there is still a long way to go.


More here...

Everyone Wants To Make Money

Fast growing Facebook is developing a new advertising system that allows marketers to target users with ads based on the personal data people reveal on the site. The company further hopes to refine the system to allow it to predict what products and services users might be interested in even.

Facebook eventually plans to grow the sophistication of the offering using algorithms to learn how receptive a person might be to an ad based on information about activities and interests of not just that given user but also his friends -- even if the user hasn't explicitly expressed interest in a given topic. Facebook could then target ads accordingly. A concept called network neighbours which I have mentioned before.

More here on the Facebook moves....

Grown Up Friends

I have noticed a marked increase in the number of LinkedIn invitations over the last few months. (BTW, the who is looking at your profile feature on the homepage is really cool). This anecdotal observation is borne out by Hitwise who have reported a 323% increase in US visits to the professional social network site over the past year...

Friending

According to a new report from Forrester "How Consumers Use Social Networks", marketers who want to reach their audiences on social networking sites should:

1. dispense with traditional Web marketing tactics,
2. encourage "friending,"
3. regularly refresh content.
   

The report includes data on both adult and youth social networking site users.

More here...

Trends & Intersections

The Future Exploration Network provides a novel way of looking at the trends that will shape our near future. They have focused on 10 areas: society & culture, government & politics, work & business, media & communications, science & technology, food & drink, medicine & well-being, financial services, retail & leisure, and transport & automotive. Click on the underground map for the PDF version.

Remarkableness

Don't you just love it when something comes along and just blows your mind with the possibilities it offers to change the way something is currently done? Well, Microsoft Live Labs has just launched Photosynth, a new application that takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space. Add tags associated with the images from Flickr for example and you have something new and special. There are a couple of things here that I cannot do justice to so I urge you to take a look at the excellent presentation from the last TED summit. Then you can download a demo of the application here. Well worth the bandwidth...