Netx › Social Media

Facebook Rewards Users For Watching Ads

Friday, May 6, 2011

Facebook introduced a new program yesterday that rewards its users with “Facebook Credits” for watching ads. This is an expansion of the partnership Facebook has with social game provider TrialPay and its DealSpot product.

The Skinny

This is a great move for Facebook, who has come under pressure for low click through rates of its ads. Nothing increases user engagement like bribery. However, advertisers should evaluate the quality of these clicks and determine the true value of this traffic. I am skeptical that incentivized traffic will lead to the same quality of customers as non-incentivized traffic. This is not to say that the traffic will not be valuable…just that it may have a different value.

Facebook is a major player in the online display advertising market and their market share continues to grow each year. It is critical for them to find a way to make their ads more valuable for advertisers.

Filed in Display Advertising, Social Media | |

RockMelt – Love it or Hate it?

Monday, November 22, 2010

We’ve been trying out RockMelt’s new social media browser at the office and the general consensus is….fun, but not when you’re trying to work.

Likes:

The Share button makes it super easy to post directly to your Facebook page or twtter account. No more logging in (which let’s face it can sometimes take forever to load), no more finding an article, then going to a short URL service, then going to twitter. One button does it all.

The search tool bar shows results without leaving the current page so you know what you’re getting before you commit to abandoning the page. It gives more control of which rabbit hole you go through…is that page better than the one I’m one? Do I really need to leave the page I’m on? Maybe I should change my search inquiry?

What I have a love/hate relationship with:

The App Edge – I love the icons with the update count. It reminds me to check the sites, but at the same time it helps me forget what I was doing in the first place. I’m trying to run a report and all of a sudden I’m knee deep in an article about Apple’s carbon fiber based iPad housing patent and have no idea what I was doing. So if I’m at home, I love the App Edge, if I’m at work, I hate it.

The Friend Edge – If you’re going to use the Friend Edge I definitely recommend “starring” the people you want to chat with. Otherwise you’ll spend half your day looking at pictures of your friend’s sister’s ex-boyfriend’s, friend from high school who just got married to that guy across the street. I also recommend you make yourself “offline” to avoid awkward old connections chatting you up when you’re in a meeting.

Overall, I really do like RockMelt – it’s fun, clean, and convenient. For work purposes I’d rather it integrate with Basecamp, but either way it’s going to be a game changer.

We have a couple invites so leave a comment if you’re interested!

Filed in NETexponent Fun, Social Media | |

New Media is People. BlogWorld 2010

Friday, October 22, 2010

Before the jet lag from the west coast finally catches up with me, I would like to take some time to recollect the experiences and insights I’ve obtained from attending BlogWorld in Las Vegas last week.

Last Wednesday, Sal Conca, Noelle Huter, Regina Black (Audible’s Marketing Manager) and I flew to Vegas to represent audible.com at BlogWorld & New Media Expo. The main reason we attended was to announce our brand new Podcast Sponsorship Program, in addition to finding bloggers who’d like to promote Audible through their affiliate program!

Regina, Sal, Val, Noelle at the Audible Booth

The Audible Podcast Sponsorship Program is a separate affiliate program just for podcasters. If you have a podcast and you’d like Audible to sponsor it, all you have to do is visit www.audibletrial.com/signup. Once you sign up, we’ll set you up with copy points and your own custom URL to refer your listeners to. If your subscribers visit your URL, they will receive a FREE audiobook download and a 14-day free trial of the AudibleListener Gold Plan. Podcasters have seen success with promoting Audible because people who listen to podcasts also have an affinity for listening to audiobooks.

For more information about the sponsorship program and Audible, listen to our very own Sal Conca’s interview with BlogWorld radio. He really killed it on here.

BlogWorld was the perfect place to find podcasters because they had a ton of sessions on podcasting. For example, there was a session specifically about how to sponsor your podcast!

In addition to the podcasting stuff, overall this was definitely an interesting conference because we met so many unique individuals and learned about new social media companies and tools. For example, at the BlogWorld party on Thursday night, we met Nomadic Matt (a blogger who records his journeys all over the world) and Benny the language hacker who goes to different countries with the goal of mastering the language of each. What fun jobs!

One innovative social media company is Paper.li, which is great for Twitter users (like me) who have trouble keeping up with all of the links that their friends share. Now you can turn your twitter into a daily newspaper that makes content easily digestible by categorizing your articles. Additionally, we were happy to be “booth neighbors” with Plixi (formerly TweetPhoto), which is a photo sharing network that integrates with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and FourSquare!

Val, Sal, Noelle & Regina at the BlogWorld party at Liquid

Finally, the closing keynote made me really consider the “New Media” industry as a whole. As Penn Jillette put it, “there is no new media.. it’s people.” He believes that, despite what critics may say, Twitter and social media actually INCREASE intimacy. They give people an outlet to talk about the things that matter the most to them and share their own opinions. His thoughts definitely made me reflect on how some businesses solely use social media to promote themselves or participate just because “everyone is doing it.” Instead, they should really learn to love New Media since it’s the closest they’ll ever get to their customers. A word of advice: embrace your followers, listen to their requests, and most of all: be honest.

BlogWorld Expo 2010 in my opinion was a great success and I hope to get the opportunity to attend next year. Thanks, Audible!

PS: Congrats to JohnnyJet for winning our booth giveaway – a brand new Amazon Kindle 3G!

Filed in Affiliate Marketing, Events, NETexponent Clients, Social Media | Tagged facebook, Social Media, twitter |

The Furture of Mobile As Told By the Giants

Friday, May 28, 2010

This week, our friends at TechCrunch.com hosted Disrupt in New York City, a conference dedicated to web innovators disrupting media and technology and the handful of executives successfully navigating these disruptions to talk about how to turn change into opportunity. At one roundtable, Facebook’s Chris Cox, Google’s Vic Gundotra, and Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley chat up a storm regarding the future of mobile, privacy controls, and the hit or miss nature of this new leaf in consumer technology.

“Your phone should be a personal assistant. That’s clearly where we’re going,” says Chris Cox of Facebook. ‘Ambient awareness’ was used multiple times to describe device relationships (rather, the necessity thereof) in our near future. But when quizzed on specifics for what phones of the future will look like and how consumer interaction will differ in the coming years of innovation, Cox had this to say:

“People overestimate what’s possible in a year, and underestimate [what's possible in ] 5 years. These devices are going to be magical in 5 years.”

Some even speculate that ‘mobile’ will be come a meaningless word soon because we are inherently always connected. “The real frontier is what’s local,” speculates one commentator, citing the popularity of groundbreaking platforms like FourSquare. “I think Foursquare has done some amazing work with check-ins, but it’s early,” says Gundotra when asked if there is a clear winner in the location game.

“I think we’re building great stuff — there is no winner,” pipes FourSquare’s Crowley. “Think of where we are now to where we were 2 years ago. We’ve made the space more interesting. We’ve pushed things in a different direction. It’s experimenting in the space.”

Speaking of experimentation, Gundotra was asked what he thought Google TV will do what for mobile apps and his answer reads a bit like an upsell, stating that “the most exciting thing about it is that the same Android apps you use will work on the TV. Like Pandora, play it on the TV.”

Facebook’s Chris Cox got a little heat regarding the ever changing privacy controls pleging the platform. He was happy to report, though, that this week, Facebook will be rolling out “drastically simplified” privacy controls in an attempt to remedy what Facebook CEO Zuckerman has publicly called “missed marks.” Facebooks next challenge? “It’s hard to know what to invest in — a better Android app or Facebook Zero.” Facebook Zero is their new, “fast, free, global and mobile” data service.

Filed in Creative Development, Display Advertising, Events, Online Marketing, Research, Social Media | |

Promoted Tweets: And Now A Word From Your Sponsor

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

In an effort to “optimize value before profit,” co-founder Biz Stone has explained, Twitter has intentionally kept the traditional web advertising model at arm’s length. But yesterday the micro blog FINALLY announced its new ad platform: Promoted Tweets. As we await the release of additional details scheduled for later this week, we do know that user searches will trigger these ads to appear at the top of that users timeline as a traditional Tweet. Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America will be among the first to launch campaigns.

Interestingly, the lives of these Sponsored Tweets are reliant on user engagement in a whole new way. “If users don’t respond …by re-tweeting, favoriting, or replying… [the ads] will be pulled from the search results,” PC World reports, adding that “only one promoted tweet will be displayed per search results page.” This almost puts one in the mind of how Google rewards PPC and organic search results with PageRank and Quality Score based on relevancy and activity. Biz Stone insists that these Promoted Tweets should be useful to users, not burdensome and disruptive and some have noted that the limited screen real estate could make for very expensive ads.

Comparisons to Twitters new platform have been to that of radio ads: you’re “listening” to the conversations of your friends (and pundits you may follow) and BOOM! Virgin America chimes in with their two cents. Then more chatter from friends and pundits, seemingly uninterrupted. The difference here is that, unlike radio ads, Twitter ads are more present (read, persistent) and will contain links – way more effective than radio ads. It’s true that these ads will be easy to ignore but in considering Twitters unprecedented engagement and interactivity users will end up reading them because they are so ingrained in the experience. Promoted Tweets may even be confused with “regular” tweets as “not a single ‘ad’ in our Promoted Tweets platform isn’t already an organic part of Twitter,” says Stone. “This is distinct from both traditional search advertising and more recent social advertising.” Promoted Tweets will also appear organically in the timelines of those who already follow a particular brand. See below for our first look at a Promoted Tweet!

Filed in Affiliate Marketing, Online Marketing, Search Marketing, Social Media | |

Top Takeaways from SES NY

Friday, March 26, 2010

Here are my top discoveries from SES NY ordered from “Hey! Good idea that’s interesting” to “Boom! What was that?! That was my mind being blown!”

No two advertisers have the same attribution model. Use attribution to see what media mix gives the highest ROI for your product.

Don’t just measure a video’s success on CTR – do an engagement analysis. How many people started the video? How many people hit the :30 mark, 1 minute? How many people rewound, fast forwarded, paused?

When it comes to link building it’s more important what others say about you than what you say about yourself. This is true in real life too by the way

Successful link building comes from finding the authority on your keywords, seeing who links to them, and then getting those sites to link back to you.

CTR increased 94% if the user was exposed to social media before searching.

SEO results are moving closer and closer to the fold. Search for ‘lamp table’ and expand all the product boxes, you’ll see what I mean.

YouTube is the #2 search engine.

4% of internet users never search. Don’t ask me what they’re doing. I guess they have a URL directory in their brain which updates in real time.

And….a glimpse into a crystal ball……There’s an app for everything why would anyone open a browser?!

Filed in Events, Online Marketing, Search Marketing, Social Media, Video Ads | Tagged attribution, PPC, Search Marketing, SEM, SEO, SES NY, Social Media, video, youtube |

Putting Social Media on the Map

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Evidently, frequent updates of what other users are merely doing at all times no longer enough, so social media outlets are integrating mapping software to allow users to attach their locations to their posts as well. All of the biggest players are unveiling new geolocation features and some businesses are incorporating this into their customer service strategies as well.

Twitter’s geolocation feature went live through its application programming interface (API) last November, yet there wasn’t been any sign of integration into the main twitter.com site until now. The screenshot (above) from TechCrunch shows that tweets with the location tag will have a placemarker next to the source. When the user hovers over the icon it turns blue, and clicking on it brings up a miniature Google map showing the location the tweet was sent from. The user can view these maps as overlays both on other user’s Twitter pages and on tweets in the main stream.

Next, according to several people briefed on the project, Facebook plans to unveil their new location-based feature in late April at the company’s yearly developer conference, f8. These sources were not authorized to discuss unannounced services, so they spoke only under the condition of anonymity.

Last November, Facebook updated its privacy policy in preparation for this new feature. Now, the policy states: “When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post.” Essentially, like all other Facebook user content, when a user posts a location they should consider the fact that this is now fairly public information.

Finally, Foursquare is a service that allows users to share their location with a group of friends as they check in to a restaurant, business or any other supporting venue upon arrival. Foursquare encourages the businesses to recognize users’ loyalty in some fashion, such as rewarding the most frequent customers with complimentary items.

With this tool, businesses will be able to see a range of real-time data about Foursquare usage, including who has “checked in” to their clients’ business locations, what time they arrived, the male-to-female customer ratio and which times of day are more active for certain customers. This research will allow business owners to offer instant promotions to engage new customers and retain current ones, similar to the loyalty cards that many retailers typically offer.

“If a restaurant can see one of its loyal customers has dropped off the map and is no longer checking in, the owner could offer them incentives to come back,” said Tristan Walker, director of business development at Foursquare.

Filed in Online Marketing, Social Media | Tagged facebook, Foursquare, Social Media, twitter |

Facebook Officially Graduates to Marketing Channel Status

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

On Wednesday March 3^rd, Facebook and Omniture announced a new platform for businesses utilizing Facebook as a promotional medium. By joining forces, the two companies can provide marketers using the increasingly prevalent advertising and social medium with the ability to analyze its impact. The two companies will begin by automating the media buying process and then allow companies to better analyze their viewership with a handful metrics. Ultimately, Omniture will help companies utilizing Facebook to reach specific users based on segments.

By utilizing Omniture tools such as SearchCenter Plus, interested companies can buy ads similar to those found in a more traditional SEM function. Also, other tools in the Facebook/Omniture arsenal will allow marketers to identify and reward their loyal customers from a comprehensive dashboard.

The prominence of Facebook as a marketing channel shouldn’t be surprising since it is now the second most utilized online service below Google with 133 million users. By achieving the number two spot, advertisers are typically confident of the ROI they can expect by investing money into Facebook as a marketing channel. Now, with the improved analytics, it might be easier to extract incremental marketing dollars from the C-Suite by flashing some strong preliminary numbers.

Filed in Online Marketing, Search Marketing, Social Media | Tagged media buying, online marketing, SEM, Social Media |

Follow Me If You Dare

Friday, February 13, 2009

Admittedly, NETexponent was a little late to the game using Twitter. With everything we have been working on in 2008 we just did not have the time. However, after launching a personal twitter account at https://twitter.com/figueredo I now have some good learning and a much better understanding of how NETexponent friends and family can benefit from a company twitter stream. I made the time in 2009 and we quietly launched a company twitter account recently. You can follow us on twitter by visiting https://twitter.com/netexponent.

This blog will continue to be your main source for information related to NETexponent, our clients, and issues concerning the performance marketing industry. We will use twitter to provide quick updates on relevant topics and some of those topics will be discussed in more detail on this blog. So please continue to read this blog but also feel free to follow us on twitter.

Filed in Meet Us, Social Media | Tagged twitter |

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