Category Archives: Social Marketing

Facebook Is Killing the Internet – And I Love It

Posted on June 2, 2010 by Tim Kilroy

OK, so right off the bat, let’s get over the whole Facebook privacy thing. While it has spurred some really interesting discussion, Facebook is not out to steal your credit card, your social security number or anything that is really, really private. We can talk about that later. Today, I want to take a look at how Facebook is just killing the internet…and, I love it.

Facebook is a giant monster. 4 bazillion people use it every day. And according to a statistic I just made up, every man woman and child in the United States wastes 119.7 hours each week playing Farmville and Mafia Wars.

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Facebook’s Open Graph: Pros, Cons and the Future

Posted on May 10, 2010 by PM Digital

PM Digital bloggers weigh-in on Facebook’s Open Graph.

Marketing Opportunities vs. Privacy

Suzy Sandberg:  When I first heard the details of Open Graph, I immediately went into Facebook to turn the feature off.  Facebook went with a pre-checked box to enable the Open Graph feature which requires unchecking to opt out.   We’ve seen this before — a Facebook platform change with privacy implications where the user must seek out and select new privacy settings in the application to undo a new feature.

Open Graph is getting buzz for two reasons:  one is its ability to socialize the internet in a new, unique way.  The other is the emergence of new privacy concerns, of which Facebook has already had its share of in the past.  Are the benefits of Open Graph really worth the positive buzz?  And/or how much of the privacy concerns are just noise?

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Facebook CPC Ads: How Big Can They Be in the Media Mix?

Posted on March 11, 2010 by Suzy Sandberg

Facebook CPC advertising, which started to gain traction with advertisers last year, resembles the early days of paid search marketing.  Launching a campaign is done in a do-it-yourself interface, and that interface is where bidding is established, payment is done by credit card, ads are created and messages targeted.  Also akin to paid search circa 2001 is that the execution of a campaign is mostly a manual process (as of yet there is no API).

As we saw with search, there is no doubt that Facebook’s features and tools will become more sophisticated and radically improve over time.  Facebook would surely like to monetize its 450 million users, and we know there are enhancements to the program already in the works.  With the attractive CPC pricing model, Facebook and would-be Facebook advertisers are lined up and waiting to sync up with APIs or at minimum, get easy access to reporting and some kind of bid management tool.

Looking into the future, could Facebook CPC ads ever become a force to be reckoned with in the media mix, matching or even exceeding paid search as a proportion of total online spend?

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Social Media: The Boisterous, New Triple Play

Posted on February 4, 2010 by Chris Paradysz

Until now, cable companies held a lock on “triple play” as a marketing phrase to indicate a consumer’s package of digital services, including phone, traditional cable and Internet access. Alas, social media has emerged as a (welcome) new threat to multi-channel marketing’s status quo and should be allowed to grab the “triple play” title (after all, cable has added a 4th play anyway — high-definition — with speculation of a 5th play in 3-D still to come).

Take the Lupus Research Institute’s Shady Ladies gala last Saturday night in Wellington, Florida.  The goal was to stir awareness for a deadly disease that mostly affects young women.  The evening event included dinner and good fun but, also, had silent and live auctions for celebrity sunglasses (Bruce Springsteen and Patti Scalfia, the Kardashians, Tom Bergeron of Dancing with the Stars fame, Beyonce etc.), as well as a few fashion pieces.

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Offline to Online: Using Print Catalogs to Boost Social Marketing

Posted on September 3, 2009 by Glenn Lalich
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It’s no secret that more retailers are using social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter to further engage consumers with their brands. Emails and websites remain the primary agents for promoting social media initiatives, but marketers with print catalogs can also leverage their offline assets to get customers to log-on and sign-up. Here are recent examples of six marketers, ranging from FetchDog to Bliss, that are using catalogs to seek out new friends, fans and followers.

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A Look at Social Media Measurement

Posted on August 11, 2009 by Anthony Avolio

SocialMediaLogosSmMost online marketers are comfortable with the measurement and metrics behind traditional click-based programs like paid search.  Less rigorously measured and discussed is activity from social media sites like user-generated links and comments placed on sites like Twitter, Facebook and StumbleUpon.  While social media as a channel presents unique challenges to measurement, there are several tactics marketers can take to start measuring the impact of social media on their business.

Outbound links. If your site includes a social bookmark or sharing tool, measuring usage of this tool can help answer…

  • Which social sites are my customers using to share my content?
  • Which types of content are customers sharing most?  Should frequently shared content be more prominently featured?
  • What type of customer is sharing content on social media outlets? Is your business benefiting from this?

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Social Marketing: Beyond the ROI

Posted on August 4, 2009 by Suzy Sandberg

The amount of social marketing conversations with clients has definitely proliferated over the past few months.  As a direct response agency, prior discussions usually started — and then died — when someone asked “but where’s the ROI model?”  Translated, this really means “it’s not trackable” and “I don’t get the metrics,” but considering that all of them — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others – are free, the ROI isn’t really questionable.  It wouldn’t take a lot of sales to offset the expense of maintaining even a limited social marketing presence.

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