Cam Balzer's Web-Cite

VivaKi And Social Media Owners Collaborate To Build Social Media Marketplace

[Here's the "authorized version"... the full press release about the VivaKi Social launch this week]

NEW YORK (December 17, 2008) - VivaKi, the strategic entity created by Publicis Groupe to leverage the combined scale of its media and digital operations, today announced the launch of its REAL Social Suite. REAL is an acronym for Reach, Engage, Amplify and Listen—requirements for clients who want to engage consumers on the social Web.

The REAL Social suite—a series of tools and partnerships that inform social outreach and messaging—was launched at a Social Media Summit held in conjunction with the VivaKi social partners featuring Facebook, as well as Buddy Media, Converseon, Meebo, Social Vibe, SocialMedia and Vitrue.  The suite also encompasses internal social marketing offerings from Publicis Groupe agencies Denuo, Moxie, MS&L and Performics.

"Clients want to participate in the consumer conversation, but there currently is no true infrastructure that allows them to participate in the dialogue," said David Kenny, Managing Partner of VivaKi. "We have brought together media owners, technology providers and internal partners to create access points and mechanisms that begin to scale audiences,  and deepen engagement while also building tools that let us measure how well we are resonating with the communities we engage."

The REAL Social Suite is divided into three "toolkit" components, each focusing on a specific step in the social media process. As a cornerstone for the suite, Facebook spans across all components of the REAL framework through its Facebook Ads system and marketing tools. Other specific partners contribute to each component of the suite as follows:

• REACH: Publicis agencies are tapping into the mass reach of social media across brand and performance marketing, and working with partners to expand both CPM and CPC buys. Performics, for example, has extended its search marketing skill set into the social web to help clients reach highly targeted audiences at scale, and optimize performance against target metrics.
• ENGAGE and AMPLIFY:  The VivaKi partners enable our clients to participate directly in the social web through innovative ad units or via engaging experiences. SocialMedia, Social Vibe and Meebo all provide variations on "socially activated ads," ad units that directly leverage social connections to make messages more relevant to participants. Buddy Media and Vitrue develop rich social campaigns across social environments that will increase and extend a brand's reach to consumer engagement. Moxie and MS&L deliver seeding solutions. Buddy Media and Vitrue develop rich social campaigns across social environments that will extend a brand's reach and increase consumer engagement. Moxie and MS&L deliver seeding solutions.
• LISTEN: Proprietary tools developed in partnership with Converseon frame social media content alongside search, traditional media and UGC data.  Insights and inspiration about audiences, brands, conversations, trends and networks fuel inspiration for creative development and research, with measurement delivered on demand via dashboards and reports. Denuo's Socialight tool (developed with Satmetrix technology) also provides a detailed snapshot of the word-of-mouth dynamics that exist in each category and for the key brands in the competitive set.

"We don't have all of the answers to activating social media, but by forming strategic alliances with a spectrum of partners and collaborating with them on tools, measurement approaches and best practices, we create a process and platform that we can continue to fortify,” said Cam Balzer, SVP of Vivaki's Social practice.  "We will continue to welcome other leaders and pioneers in the social space, toward the goal of creating viable 'on ramps' for our clients to more deeply and effectively engage their customers as fellow participants in the social web."

[update: release is live here: VivaKi And Social Media Owners Collaborate...]

VivaKi Bets it Can Make Social Media Scale - Advertising Age - DigitalNext

VivaKi Bets it Can Make Social Media Scale - Advertising Age - DigitalNext.

Here's what we've been working on over at VivaKi. Great launch events this week. I'll have some more to say on these topics not that it's all public.

Clearing Hurdles to Social Advertising

This piece from today's NYTimes is pretty typical of the "banners don't work on social networks" story we're seeing a lot of these days. Stories like this reflect the negative sentiment about Facebook and other social sites where "advertising doesn't work". Should be obvious (and not a story anymore) that traditional approaches aren't going to fly in social networks.

Digital Domain: Advertisers Face Hurdles on Social Networking Sites
By RANDALL STROSS
Web advertising experts see a myriad of difficulties in making brand advertising work on social networking sites.

In this context, the best approach is to get a Toolkit of social solutions into the hands of the right people (namely, agencies and their clients) to tackle the problems and build the winning strategies and solutions. No one has all--or even many--of the answers yet. As an industry and as VivaKi, we collectively need more data, more tests, more collective good thinking to make social successful, repeatable and scalable.

Economist on social network spend: "cautious excitement"

The Economist is bullish on online ad spend next year. I'm banking on it! They also highlight social network advertising as one of the potential bright spots. Refreshing to see them not jump on the "clickthrough rates are low, ergo its failing" bandwagon. They may be right that social network advertising has "thus far proved ineffective" only if you take "advertising" in the most literal sense: sure, banner performance "sucks". But the "clever marketing managers" (partnering with clever tech/media entrepreneurs) Mary Meeker lauds will recognize that effective advertising on these sites is going to look and work different than banners... just like search, the phoenix rising from the last flameout, looks and works different than banners. The "arb" opp, then, is to capitalize on market skepticism and exploit the perception vs real opportunity gap. Sure there might be actual "buy low, sell high" arb opps, but the early mover and bold investor arbitragers will be the ones with enduring businesses at the end of this all:

The industry is also cautiously excited about two new forms of online advertising: [first is video.]

The other hope is for ads on social networks such as MySpace and Facebook. They are experimenting with a variety of advertising formats, though none has yet proved very successful. Their big weakness is that users go to social-networking sites to socialise, not to shop (as they might on search engines). Their biggest strength is that users spend so much time there. Two years ago 11% of time spent online was at Yahoo! and MSN, two web portals; now their share is down to 5%, and 5% of online time is spent at YouTube and Facebook.

Online traffic, in other words, is moving towards sites where advertising has so far proved ineffective and is therefore cheap. This, says Ms Meeker, presents an opportunity for innovation and arbitrage by clever marketing managers as they cut their conventional ad budgets. It may also provide a glimmer of hope for the advertising industry as it enters recession.

Not ye olde banners | The Economist (Nov 27, 2008)

Crux for the day: "Battling Economic Forces While Building for the Future"

Some great insights from Jack Myers on balancing future and present in today's media world, where old models are eroding at the same time the bottom is falling out of the economy... and of advertising/media budgets:

Companies emerge from recessions with visionary products and services that meet their customers' future needs, not with products and services that meet the needs and business models of the past. Yet you cannot escape the reality that investing in the future is unlikely to be justified in the current economy.... traditional models are no longer acceptable for companies that seek to generate premium value for their products and services. Immediate investment with partners that represent the future – partners such as TiVo and a handful of others – will prepare you for 2011 and beyond. (jackmyers.com)

Myers lists several valuable tips for managing this crux, including having a dual management team to address today's needs and tomorrow's opportunities without either getting short shrift.