Cam Balzer's Web-Cite

Performics Search to spread wings, fly

Well, after months of speculation, the official word is in: Selling Performics Search Marketing. The emerging media team will be tagging along with our big brother the search business while our friends in affiliate will become part of Google. I for one will continue to make the most of excellent catered lunches (while they last) now that I know my fate!

Heather Hancock at The Artist Project

Bend, originally uploaded by hhmosaics.

Heather will be exhibiting new mixed media mosaics at The Artist Project, part of Chicago's Artropolis, later this month. I get to watch these creations come to life one shard of glass at a time and can't help broadcasting it when they're going to be showing somewhere everyone else can enjoy them too...

"This App Blows" say .07% of users

Blogs love a headline like this: CBS Sports Facing March Madness Backlash on Facebook. 'This App Blows." Get's readers in the door. Even if it isn't very accurate. Sure the CBS app may be flawed, but it has 439,793 daily active users among an installed base of approximately 1.2M users (as of 3/24). If all 913 of the applications' wall posts are negative reviews (and a quick scan shows that many of them are decent reviews and plenty are spam for other sites or applications), that's still only 0.07% of total installed user base that are dissatisfied enough to post negative reviews.

You'd think a blog like TechCrunch, whose posts frequently get showered with negative comments, would understand that Web 2.0 mechanisms amplify negative reviews and that actual user behavior (large installed base, lots of readers & page views) need to be considered before writing off a site/product/campaign as a failure.

The negative din is daunting for marketers considering playing in the social space. There are good lessons to be learned from this case study: don't mess with March Madness, give your users what you want, make your UI user-proof. Biggest lesson may be: expect negative feedback and plan your response ahead of time.

Social <> Advertising?

Interesting analysis by Catharine Taylor of the challenge of advertising in a social web context, arguing that "Maybe Advertising In Social Media Should Be An Oxymoron." She highlights the very engaging Dell ReGeneration campaign (current big brand on social site poster child), and an example from the other end of the spectrum: a hair loss cream ad running on Facebook.

I've seen those ads too. They are terrible. They don't seem to be using any of Facebook's Social Ad targeting parameters, especially if a woman is seeing them. Unfortunately, lousy, lazy advertising like this is being taken as evidence that effective advertising on social sites is not possible. Or worse yet, that Facebook's social ads platform doesn't work.

Here's the most optimistic reading possible of these lazy ads, in an effort to highlight the opportunity of social performance marketing that's currently being overlooked:

• these lousy ads mean the Social Ads platform is delivering cheap clicks to advertisers in a highly optimizable fashion. If these hair loss ads are running on a self-serve, PPC platform, maybe they are actually working for the advertiser. The clickthru rate may be 0.01% but with millions of impressions and cheap CPCs, the ad could be driving some decent ROI. What direct marketer would spend all that money on all those impressions with no return?
• maybe the ads appear lazy but are actually being targeted by age/gender or other targeting parameters. A non-lazy advertiser might start serving a single general ad to multiple audience segments, tracking costs and results to specific segments, and later honing in on the segments that work.

I agree with Taylor that advertising on a social network is fraught with peril. But hoping that we'll see a social network do for advertising on social sites what Google did with ads on search: make those ads so relevant that the ads actually enhance the user's experience. The platform is coming that will let advertisers target social users with incredibly relevant ads. The question is whether advertisers will put in the extra effort required.

Social Performance Marketing - a definition

If

Performance Marketing = massively microtargeted, bidded, dynamically optimizable accountable online campaigns

Then

Social Performance Marketing = performance marketing campaigns executed on social web sites and leveraging social engagement "kickers" to enhance the performance of the performance media buys

Social Performance Marketing is a new option for marketers to engage consumers and drive cost-effective sales/leads online. It's new because only within the last several months has there been a way to buy bidded (CPC, bidded CPM) media on social network sites. Facebook's Social Ads, launched in November but a bit lost in the Beacon kerfuffle, is a tremendously promising option for buying targeted media on performance basis. Google Demographic Bidding let's you bid more for clicks/impressions from users of specific demographics on social network sites.

SPM (there, I coined another acronym) is REALLY new because there's only one place to tie the "engagement kickers" directly to the ads: Facebook Social Ads again. By creating an engaging page or application on Facebook, advertisers can build a fan base. Those fans give the marketer access to an extended "friend of a fan" network. Ads shown to friends of fans can carry an implied social endorsement: a Performics recruiting ad could carry a "Cam become a fan of DoubleClick Performics" message along with it when shown to my 150+ friends. Seeing my face and implied endorsement on the ad makes it much more relevant to my friends, meaning higher click rates and conversion rates and better performance for the dollar.

I'm going on the record as saying:

• Facebook won't be the only social network / social web site to make performance advertising more relevant by tapping social data
• If John Battelle's prediction comes true ("PS: I Think There is A *Huge* Business in Social Advertising"), it will be when Facebook or someone else or multiple players figures out how to make Social Performance Marketing scalable for large and small advertisers.

That's what made search work: scale + efficiency. Having seen search scale from an obscure, mom/pop affiliate channel to the largest online ad channel, I say "bring it on"!

Ping.fm - microblog rebroadcasting

Ping.fm lets you broadcast your status to all your favorite microblogging/status services: jaiku, twitter, facebook, etc: Ping.fm. Beta code: pingit.

AOL-Bebo analysis from eMarketer

Nice analysis from eMarketer: Why the AOL-Bebo Deal Matters

AOL hooks up with Bebo

AOL Buys Bebo for $850 Million (WSJ). An significant step towards the future of Social Performance Marketing that I'll be talking about at the IAB Performance Marketing Forum next week...

Let the next phase begin

Now things really get interesting: EU Clears Google-DoubleClick Deal (WSJ)

And direct from the mothership: We've officially acquired DoubleClick

Keynote at IAB's Performance Marketing Leadership Forum

I will be keynoting at next week's IAB Leadership Forum: Performance Marketing next Wednesday 3/19 afternoon in Chicago. My topic is performance marketing on social networks, a key emerging trend in accountable online marketing. Hope to see you there!