The Future of Social Ad Targeting

Facebook is by far the most user generated content rich sites when it comes to aggregating consumer’s preferences to real world products and services i.e. people fanning pages (1.5MM+ fan pages). The overall challenge with Social Ad Targeting is respecting consumer privacy and the fact that a great deal of social information is now public domain. Companies like MyLikes.com “Word of mouth advertising platform connecting advertisers with influencers Share your likes with friends, make money or donate it to charity” are using peoples “networks” like on Twitter to broadcast brand offers they get paid when others click. The big question is authenticity and will this increase relevance?

Now we’re seeing a fast move towards more audience targeting, where demographic, behavioral and contextual data are aggregated to create a unified view of a target audience. Social graph ad targeting is a way for marketers to target consumers based on who they're connected to within online social networks but its hard to see if these companies are really using the graph or just doing cookie based re-targeting as we talk about below.

The offline world has been doing this for years and has highly structured data trading processes where as the online marketing world is just starting to really trade in this valuable currency.

The consumer self selected information is becoming the nexus of this equation, however, with Facebook recent changes in its data use policy ad platforms that once got data from API / FB Connect sites are now or should be disconnected.

Special Provisions Applicable to Developers/Operators of Applications and Websites
2.6. You will not directly or indirectly transfer any data you receive from us to (or use such data in connection with) any ad network, ad exchange, data broker, or other advertising related toolset, even if a user consents to that transfer or use.

Analysis: This entirely new clause strongly suggests that some online advertising companies have been doing exactly what it says they shouldn’t be. This is unsurprising given that many online advertising companies have built their businesses on secretly buying and selling user data, however that data might have been gained, then using the information to do things like target ads. It’s not clear how Facebook can enforce their good behavior on its site, but the clause is a good first step to limiting abuse.

Using cookies and attaching those cookies to Personally Identifiable Information (PII) violates privacy laws created to protect consumer’s privacy, HOWEVER, brands, publisher sites and ad platforms have figured out that consumers check the box on the privacy policy and terms of use policy without reading anything opened up the door to PII and cookie. We’re seeing major players engaged at scale to improve ad targeting (re targeting) using data obtained from database marketing, social sites and other highly segmented data to improve ad efficiency. The NAI is pushing hard on policymakers from enacting tough online privacy rules recently released a new study showing that ads targeted based on users' prior Web-surfing behavior are more valuable than run-of-network ads.

"It's clear that behavioral targeting has the potential to significantly elevate the value of the inventory -- to the advertiser, to the publisher and to the network," says report author Howard Beales, a former head of consumer protection for the Federal Trade Commission.
The study is based on a survey of 12 ad networks -- all NAI members -- about their 2009 ad revenues. For the study, researchers surveyed 12 ad networks that belong to the NAI about their 2009 ad revenues. Beales reports that marketers paid average CPMs of $4.12 for behaviorally targeted ads, compared to $1.98 for run-of-network ads.

As of last week Facebook’s deputy general Michael Richter announced “ In the proposed privacy policy, we've also explained the possibility of working with some partner websites that we pre-approve to offer a more personalized experience at the moment you visit the site. In such instances, we would only introduce this feature with a small, select group of partners and we would also offer new controls.” In other words, partners are going to use social targeting and leveraging your graph to increase Facebook and their monetization.
The off-site and in game opportunity is enormous using consumer data to increase ad relevance. Using social data to improve ad efficiency is not new concept and a recent study by Razorfish shows that those who fan have 3 fundamental elements; Love of the Brand, Exclusive Deals/Offers and Service/Support


This is the year were more companies will push the boundaries of the social graph to increase sharing, conversation and click through probability. With all good things there will be the bad apples abusing consumers. We hope that targeting will reduce the visual spam were getting now and add continuous value.

Chase
@ChaseMcMichael

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Facebook / Twitter Stats Show Buyers are Followers

A new study from Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research Technologies found that consumers are 67% more likely to buy from the brands they follow on Twitter, and 51% more likely to buy from a brand they follow on Facebook. Moreover, they’re 79% more likely to recommend their Twitter follows to a friend, and 60% more likely to do the same on Facebook:

This was obtained from The Retail Advertising and Marketing Association, a division of National Retail Federation, released new research at NRF’s Retail Innovation & Marketing Conference on the habits of social media users. They are comparing social media users to the average U.S. adult, which is to say is the SM user different or desires more media stimulation. The survey looks at the differences in demographics for each group, including male and female usage as well as age differences in social media users compared to other adults. I like to compare these results to what the Fortune 100 is doing with social media and see the overlap.

•Seven out of 10 social media users between the ages of 18-34 regularly use Facebook more than other sites such as MySpace, Twitter and Classmates
•71.8 percent of social media users say that after an online search, they communicate with others about a product or service with face-to-face communication
•More people who use social media prefer to give advice about a product or service rather than receive it
•Social media users are more likely to use other new media compared to adults 18+
•70.6 percent of female social media users regularly use Facebook, compared to 61.0 percent of males
•More men than women prefer to communicate with others via a cell phone conversation after searching for a product or service online



Above came from "The Global Social Media Check-up" Insights from the Burson-Marsteller Evidence-Based Communications

This is very supportive to my position that social analysis is a key element to any social strategy, however, the only problem is there is not one single solution making it more difficult to do quantitative measurement. Here is The top 4 things all business must consider when launching their social presence.

1. Monitor Your Own — And Competitors — Social Media Presence.
Ton of social listening product only problem is who are you listening to. If you don't identify who is connected to you and who are you customers you will find fast that you can get overwhelmed with the flood of data. The key is WHO has the reach to your audience that matters.

2. Get Top Management “Buy In.”
This is so important and the big question is who in your company at the management level really uses say Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin. You will find there use of the technology many not be the same as your consumer or the brands social equity value to a consumer.

3. Develop a Social Media Strategy.
If the plan is to set up a fan page and twitter but not to feed it and co opt in people in the organization or find and grow social brand evangelism for a long term objective the results will case number 2 above to fade. People in the organization need to be involved and own this not just your agency with the next big idea.

4. Define and Publish a Social Media Policy.
I have done many corporate social analysis and found major bloggees and ultra connectors in companies that are not being valued at all. These people and the entire employee base is a HUGE asset to the social media equation. The number of people in a company that are connected to friends ie your customers most likely is massive. If you don't provide guidance and how to leverage this base the base will do it for you.

I'm still working on the next post regarding industry penetration based on type for Facebook.

Chase

Moms and Social Marketing 2010

Over the past year I have been observing my wife and the use of social media. It's been amazing what I have found out and her overall behavior around social brand interaction. The Mom Marketing BIGresearch, 2009 did a great job highlighting things I was able to directly observe. Here is a great verification to what I observed.

According to a Retail Advertising and Marketing Association survey conducted by BIGresearch, women with children at home are more likely to use Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter than average adults. Additionally, 15.3% maintain their own blog.

Mike Gatti, Executive Director for RAMA, suggests that "... retailers who aren't engaging customers through social media could be missing the boat... the web provides efficient, convenient ways for brands to stay in front of their most loyal shoppers and attract new ones."

On a scale of one to five, when asked what types of promotions most influence their purchases, product samples in the store, product samples delivered to home, loyalty cards, and special displays rank as moms' favorites, says the report.

32.9% of Moms prefer department stores and 23.2% head to specialty apparel stores when shopping for clothes for themselves. Shopping for their children's clothes, 30.7% say they head to discount stores, 19.6% say department stores and 17.5% prefer specialty apparel stores. 45% of Moms also most prefer discounters the most for their children's toys and for their own personal health and beauty products.

When it comes to the traditional media preferences, the Food Network and the Discovery Channel are the top cable TV picks, People and Cosmopolitan are the most-preferred magazines, and the daily local and weekly community newspapers are at the top of the list of most-read.


Though individual comments don't constitute a comprehensive study, they are valuable in considering the marketing message. When asked what advertisers on Facebook should do that they aren't currently doing, moms say:
• "Provide exclusive offers (i.e., printable coupons, etc.). Exclusive offers would entice me to respond to the message (not just read/glance at [it]), and I might look them up on Facebook and become a fan."
• "[Be] more interactive. Starbucks is a good example - they just had a Facebook campaign where you could send a coupon for a free Starbucks ice cream to a friend on Facebook."
• "Offer samples."
• "Certificates or coupons for freebies or special discount offers. I always print those and use them."
• "Coupons/discounts for family places [such as] restaurants or coupons for grocery stores."
• "[Be] a little more targeted with online store specials."
• "Just talk to us. Direct us to Twitter or a blog where we can talk back. It's too complicated to carry on a conversation on Facebook. Make it easy for us."
• "I'd like to be able to comment on something they post without being alerted every time someone else makes a post. Sometimes that becomes distracting."
• "Provide something that would actually help me, not just market their product."
• "I like being a fan and following the products/companies that I choose to follow. It makes me feel like I can make the choice of what advertisements I am willing to pay attention to. Advertisers need to move toward fan pages and away from the sidebar ads. Running the occasional contest is always fun!"

For more depth on the report check out http://www.nrf.com/modules.php?name=News&op=viewlive&sp_id=786

Chase McMichael
@ChaseUNBOUND

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Brand Growth on Facebook Part 2 Year End Addition

“Twenty Ten” is being called the year of social driving ROI and measurement. The year 2009 held a great deal of social experimentation with wins for Dell, BestBuy and Target all pushing exclusive discounts to their Facebook ”fans” or Twitter “followers”. (unlike calling them “buddies” in the day of instant messaging). This is UNBOUND’s 2nd series of Brand Growth on Facebook year end addition. For any marketer the truth be told that your customers online, 20% of the clickers on the internet make up 80% of the buyers. These numbers have been kicked around for some time. In a recent Forester article saying “Social Marketing will go from ‘cool’ in 2009 to ‘strategic’ in 2010” and I fully agree.

Now with social network, the ability to instantaneous broadcast to your “friends” on what you fan or tweeting out a recent discovered discount or good experience with a retailer is most likely the biggest game changer for marketers to not only harness but better understand their consumers over all passion points and product preferences. In this blog post we have compiled the Top Fan page categories based on what we call Top Brands. Top Brands are those that have links to a known brand or the actual brand themselves maintain. There are over 1.4 Million fan pages on Facebook making a very long tail where in this post we have segmented out the top 100,000 and organized them to see how the leaders in their categories are mastering the social graph. For their competitors, 2010 will be a game of catch up inserting themselves into the Social Conversation. Brands start taking advantage of social graphs. If the late '00s were the era of the social network, the early '10s will see the rise of the "social graph" -- the network of you, your friends, and the friends of your friends.

On Facebook fan pages can be set with a type such as:


In the past year Facebook has greatly diversified brand sub types adding in Fashion, Other Business, Sports / Athletics. UNBOUND has done an extensive amount of cleaning the data since fan pages are user generated. We will show the “Other” category we created to assist in organizing consumer affinities.


All major brands have an Industry Type SIC Code and we have also assigned SIC codes to fan pages to enable vertical industry segmentation. From the top listings it's now each to see what industry types dominates Facebook.





Here we have highlighted the Top Ten winners for specific categories.
Games is the smallest category, however, has some of the largest fanning on Facebook.


Tapping into consumers' entertainment preferences such as TV shows and their relation to other products, services provides a brand the most comprehensive foundation for performing large scale consumer affinity analysis. By ranking these affinities aligned with the categories we reviewed here creates an in-depth consumer insight of your community as it grows.






Brand now have the ability to not only see the direct consumer reach (friend of friend) their fan base has but also the collective top affinities organized to build ultra high viral campaigns using Social Network Intelligence. (If you guessed the above affinity map links with a female consumer product you would be right)

Consumers have created over a million Facebook fan pages since Facebook opened up the fan page creation. Below is just a sample of what we call miss typed fan pages whereby the Fan page Admin selected a type. UNBOUND has taken great care in typing these into the “Other” category to produce clean affinity maps. However, this information is great value for many marketers using these Other types.


The amazing aspect of analyzing UGC Fan pages is seeing that a large set of consumers are sleep deprived, want more leisure time and desire laughter in their life.



In conclusion…… well maybe there’s not a conclusion just a big wake up call for the brands that have yet to realize social is not just some check box or insertion order but a viable way to tip the balance of getting to the hearts and minds of loyal customers making them super fans or brand beacons.



Twenty Ten will be the year brands demand better social analysis and measurement as more dollars are shifted in this not so “New Media” channel. Brands have to understand their social graphs, who are their top rank consumers, who have blogs, who is on twitter and how many of their customers are on what social networks to start maximizing their social asset.

Callan Green Killer Facebook Fan Pages: 5 Inspiring Case Studies did a great job highlighting some examples that will inspire you.

Chase McMichael @ChaseUNBOUND

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Brands start taking advantage of social graphs.

I got this off of Ad Age today and added in a few things.
Brands start taking advantage of social graphs.
If the late '00s were the era of the social network, the early '10s will see the rise of the "social graph" -- the network of you, your friends, and the friends of your friends.

There is going to be a play here for using consumers presence with Instant Messaging and the use of realtime as well .

Everyone has a social graph. In fact, the point of social networking has been to build one. We will now see services like Facebook and Google start to use social graph data more aggressively as we move away from the "destination web" towards a "social web" whereby people get information through their networks rather than a specific site. Facebook's new "reconnect with" feature is one implementation of social graph data.

The social graph needs two kinds of tool to work. At the service end, it needs algorithms -- the formula that use your graph to determine what information and connections you value most, which allows services to predict what information you're going to like (including, of course, which products and marketing communications you'll appreciate). At the user end, it needs filters -- the ability to group people and information more effectively to get the most out of a network. The effectiveness of both algorithms and filters are improving rapidly, and these will be a big factor in the continued evolution of social media.

In 2010 there will be a heightened need for brands to understand how to be more social in order to access these more segmented networks. There's increasing evidence that the ROI of social media is definitely worth the effort.

In my next post will talk to some of the above approaches in Social Brand Growth Part II.

2010 social intelligence and e-mail marketing trends

2010 looks to be a big year for marketing plan integrating social intelligence to drive lead generation and rethinking their spend on how to leverage social targeting and email marketing combination.

Karen J. Bannan “Looking ahead: 2010 e-mail marketing trends” references leader StrongMail in the “2010 Marketing Trends Survey” indicates 89% of respondents plan to increase or maintain marketing spend in email marketing and social media budgets in the New Year. Of the 1,000 global business leaders found that the positive outlook is supported by 50% of polled businesses that expect their customers to spend more in 2010, and nearly a quarter more that expect them to spend the same. Only 8% of businesses expect their customers to spend less.
Email and social media marketing are the two leading areas of investment at 69% and 59% respectively.

(Thanks for the blug Kristin)

They will do so using several strategies, said Kristin Hersant, StrongMail’s director of corporate marketing. “We see marketers getting a lot more sophisticated, leveraging the viral aspect of the Web,” she said. “For example, using targeted segmentation to create a referral program with their top influencers, who they know are most active with their brand.”

Hersant said tools are finally coming to the market that will help marketers tease out the most active users on their lists by examining engagement metrics. Companies such as UNBOUND Technologies . can scrub those lists to determine which recipients are active in the social networking world and the networks they are on.

Among their goals, marketers reported a desire to increase relevancy by adopting segmentation and targeting, cited by 46% of respondents.

With social media marketing a clear focus for businesses, Respondents identified the top three benefits of social media marketing as:
• Awareness building (64%)
• Customer loyalty and retention (49%)
• Expanded reach (46%)
Bill Wagner, executive vice president of business operations at StrongMail, notes that “… this survey reveals a strong focus on high ROI channels like email and emerging ones like social media… (with) an unprecedented number of companies look to integrate email and social media in 2010…”

Reported survey highlights include:

• 89% of businesses plan to increase or maintain marketing spend in 2010


• 50% of businesses expect customers to spend more; 23% to spend about the same; 8% to spend less


• 69% of businesses plan to increase marketing budget for email; 59% social media; 42% search


• 69% of businesses plan to integrate email and social media in 2010


• 64% of businesses identify increasing awareness as the primary value for social media

The key here is you need to have a clear understanding of your consumers’ passion points, where they are interacting and your possible influencers. 2010 is a big year for Social Intelligence and Social Consumer Insight making email the quick hit for marketers in the new year.

Chase McMichael

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Incorporate Social Network Intelligence in your Marketing Strategy and Win!

Posting the presentation at AdTech NY 09:
Social networks are about conversations. Effective social marketing is about having those conversations with the right people. At this session UNBOUND Technologies Chase McMichael and Room 214’s James Clark will demonstrate a case history of the Travel Channel to show how they used Social Network Intelligence to identify, target, and analyze customers across the social graph and then tapped into their passion points. Hear how to create and nurture highly targeted marketing conversations that impact not just individuals, but influence entire online communities.

Results in 6 Months

* Social Media Traffic Drivers

o Facebook Top 10 Referring Source

* Fan Base

o 375,000 Community Members

o 1.8 Million Kidnap! Users

* Fan Base

o 375,000 Community Members

o 1.8 Million Kidnap! App Users

o 350,000 Uniques to “I Have The Bug”

o 81,000 Hungry for More App Users

o Over 40,000 online conversations about Travel Channel

o 80% Positive Sentiment

o 150 – 1,500 Live Chat Participants

Ad Tech UNBOUND Room214 11 2 09

View more presentations from Chase McMichael.

Interested in getting results like this? Contact us and will show you at sales@unboundtech.com or call 888 377 1264

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