Cam Balzer's Web-Cite

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...

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!

O'Reilly Radar at GSP/ETech

koan-like notes from Tim O'reilly's "Radar" session at ETech / GSP:

• I love hackers 
• Etech is about the edges
• Received knowl v original knowl 
• Wikipedia: no original research
• Polyani: personal knowl commits us. Like love. Shirt of flame 
• Passion of hackers. Swivel. Choose the cookie!
• Wright brothers. Pythagorus. Joe kittinger. 
• Space hackers.
• Believe and create. 
• Web 2 successes created in yrs after the bust
• Open source hardware. Liam Casey supply chain. 
• Ambient computing added to web 2: sensors and pple away from the keyboard. Openmoko
• Dash express. Swarming internet devices is openmoko. 
• Path intelligence measured by cell phone home signals
• ms photosynth 
• Social graph from cell usage logs: megaphone
• Hackers change the world by having fun.
• Willow garage personal robots 
• Open CV computer visuals
• When you follow the hackers you don't know what it means. You just know something is up. 
• Collective intelligence. Coding against corruption. Matt cutts of govt.
• Worldchanging 
• Rilke. Man watching

More Social Network Anti-hype that Misses the Point...

I guess this is what counts as "bad news" for social networks. Anecdote reinforcing a single data point spun into a death nell for social networks: Generation MySpace Is Getting Fed Up. This is a bit of buzz backlash: anti-buzz buzz.

While the reporter barely comprehends the social network ad space moderately well (Beacon isn't an ad platform), I agree with the implication that "banners don’t work on social networks"… that is: when they are CPM buys. CPC media looks like it can work. We've got a testing going for instance that is delivering a nice order volume at a CPO half of search. Not as much volume as your average Google campaign but huge impressions and good conversions off of the clicks, even though CTRs are low.

Let's call this "Social Performance Marketing", realize that this doesn't mean flooding users with undifferentiated and untargeted banners and get on with figuring out how to engage and connect with the people now "living" on social networks...

Nothing to see here. No Sir. Social sites definitely aren't going to work for marketers...

That's right, CMOs and CPGs, nothing to see here. Social Sites Don't Deliver Big Ad Gains, says WSJ.com. Move on to the next sexiest thing.

[There... that oughta buy us performance marketers some time. We'll get back to buying highly qualified traffic on a bidded cost per click, working through the kinks some new but promising alpha-grade platforms until we figure out how to spin those clicks into gold at scale. We can use some time below the radar before we re-emerge to take over the world... like we did with search marketing.]

[BTW, did you notice the interesting caveat on Kara Swisher's scoop re FB revenue:

A Kara source suggests that Mark's 2008 projection does not include a successful Beacon-style social-network-advertising product. If this is true, and if Facebook can finally get Beacon working right, perhaps it will yet be able to tap into a Google-like revenue stream. If not, however, it's time to stop talking about Facebook being "the next Google" -- because it isn't. Silicon Alley Insider

That's a lot of if's and perhaps's for a product that is still really an alpha.]

C2C banner buys?

Fun new alpha from Yahoo: Me2U, which is basically person to person marketing, for fun. You create a nice flash ad unit, the squarish size that shows up all over the place on content pages on Yahoo, too frequently with inhuman, badly drawn dancing automaton's trying to sell you a refi. Then you enter your target's emails and they see a personalized ad among the other ads they are (probably) tuning out...

Send personalized messages to your friends and family as banner ads on the Yahoo! network.

Very cool: ads become "hackable" and useful for the little guy. Aside from classifieds, which Craig and his list have done in, who would have previously perceived a need for this kind of functionality. Nice idea Y!.

Open question: you've got so much great web 2 stuff under your umbrella, can you just make another big play here, blow through some of the internal barriers you seem to face in product dev / management and tie all Y! things social into a big awesome bundle.

No surprise that a Murdoch company has bigger ambitions!

MySpace looks to be trying to follow Google's lead by taking their purpose built ad platform to a broader distribution network. Known as "FIM Serve" (FIM = Fox Interactive Media), it is being proffered to other Fox/News Corp properties and...

Ultimately we'll take the company off network and become an ad network for assets outside of the News Corporation empire. (News Corp builds online ad network)

Peter Levinsohn is quoted as saying this could happen as early as mid 2008.

I would expect this platform to provide performance marketers with both CPC and CPA opportunities.

Even Orwell fans not creeped out by profile targeting

I absolutely LOVE this test that David Berkowitz ran with Facebook's profile-targeted ads. Those ads allow marketers (or any individual with a credit card and a hankering for clicks... David is apparently both!) to target ads at FB member's interests. David targeted users whose profiles included "1984" as an interest with an ad asking if they thought this targeting was creepy. Results aren't scientific, but they show that even potentially paranoid lovers of Orwell aren't really that creeped out. David's account and comments from real ad clickers here: Facebook Ad Targeting: From 2007 To 1984.

Quick, someone test this on the even more paranoid readers of Pynchon or DeLillo!

But seriously... a potentially knottier question is whether those fans and their friends will be more creeped-out by seeing Social Ads that says

Cam became a fan of "The Crying of Lot 49"
Save now on other books you didn't really read in college. Bookstore.com

Marketers will need to handle this power deftly: too brazen and it will turn off both fans and their friends. Given the free access they give to the ad platform and the likelihood for unsophisticated marketers to act deftly, Facebook will need to be, well, authoritarian in policing! Hmmm...

(image from Shepherd Fairey's NineteenEightyFouria exhibition, strangely apropos...)

Will Google be "the next Google"?

Nice narrative overview from Forbes of the competing visions for the future of social networks and advertising, as promulgated by Facebook and Google over the last 10 days for so: Facebook, Google go to war over the future of advertising.

It does feel like the airy-fairy "untold opportunity" in social advertising has suddenly started to gel. The question now, reflecting back on the evolution of paid search: who is the next  Overture in this model and who will be the next Google? Who will get really close and set the stage for the next player to get it really really right?