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Last week at the F8 conference, Mark Zuckerberg announced what might turn out to be one of the most important announcements in Facebook’s short tenure.  The idea is simple, create instantly social and personalized experiences everywhere you go and do so with less friction for a truly social experience.  With close to 500M users, Facebook is well positioned to be the company that connects us all; not only with one another, but also with the vast amount of news, information & entertainment that exists on the Internet today.

They are going to do this in a few ways.  The first is the Open Graph.  If you currently have a Facebook account, you have a social graph within Facebook that connect you to the people, places, things (and hopefully brands) that you have relationships with.  You also have social graphs on other sites, like Pandora, Yelp, CNN, ESPN, etc…  Facebook’s Open Graph is an attempt to connect all of these social graphs together to create a more relevant, meaningful user experience for consumers all over the web.

Facebook’s Social Plug-ins are the pieces of technology that is going to make all of this possible:

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Earlier this week, Gavin and I attend the IAB Social MEdia Conference at New York City’s Roosevelt Hotel.  This was a packed day of speakers and panels discussing the implications of social media for marketers and agencies alike.  As with SXSW, a lot of the discussion surrounded location based mobile phone apps, like FourSquare.  No, not that fun game you used to play as a kid in the playground.  FourSquare is a location-based social networking site, application for mobile smartphones, and game.  Users “check-in” at venues to indicate where they currently are; by doing this they are then awarded points and sometimes “badges.”

Although only a handful of advertisers have explored the platform for promotion purposes we see this as a trend that will be taking off in the near future.  Check out the two videos below and leave comments if you have questions about FourSquare – and next time you stop by Butler/Till make sure you check-in.

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Scissors are a great tool; they allow us to separate things, open boxes, and create works of art, but they can also be dangerous.  The same holds true for social media; it can create and foster consumer relationships, cultivate brand advocates/ambassadors & generate brand awareness and favorability, but it too can be dangerous.

As a child your parents, teachers and elders told you not to run with scissors.  Furthermore, they told you to walk with the pointed end of the scissors facing the ground, in case of a fall (sorry for that visual).

More often than not, brands enter into social media running with the scissors.  They create a Facebook page, Twitter account or YouTube channel with no real thought as to what the desired outcome could, or should, be.

When/if you have the urge to do this as a marketer, take a step back, think about the outcome and objectives.  You certainly wouldn’t run with scissors as an adult.

We will be attending two sessions later today that are going to be amazing.
The first is by Gary Vaynerchuk, if you don’t know who Gary is check out GaryVaynerchuk.com and Wine Library TV. He is one of the people on the forefront of social media and its use to help businesses grow and thrive. Gary is also one of the most passionate people in the world and that enthusiasm always translates to his on-stage presence.

The second is by Ev Williams, co-founder of Twitter. There has been a lot of speculation around what Twitter will announce at SXSW Interactive.  Most expect the announcement to be made during the keynote this afternoon. We’ll be breaking that news as it happens right here on Media Mosaic.

Keep checking back throughout the day for updates.  Also, make sure to check out our other SXSW content in the videos below. Cheers.

I’m sure we’ve all had this experience before… you see something on TV that you might want to purchase and it is appealing enough to push you into a retail location. There you can interact (feel, touch, play) with the product, only to find out that it isn’t what you were looking for. Read the rest of this entry »

The ability to track an action in the online space is not new to advertisers or agencies, but tying it back to specific ads (banner and search) is a relatively recent advancement.  No longer is it cutting-edge to simply know which publisher or creative resulted in a click.  Marketers now have the ability to attribute specific exposures to any number of desired actions on their website or landing page.  This in turn provides an opportunity for improved campaign stewardship

 While this type of online tracking requires considerable pre-campaign planning and ongoing attention throughout a campaign, it provides invaluable data to improve and optimize in real-time.  This type of data allows for enhanced reporting which in turn provides enhanced insights into ROI and awareness metrics.

 Technological advancements in the tracking of digital campaign are happening at an astonishing rate and any advertiser or agency committed to stewardship should utilize them to their full advantage.

The ability to track an action in the online space is not new to advertisers or agencies, but tying it back to specific ads (banner and search) is a relatively recent advancement.  No longer is it cutting-edge to simply know which publisher or creative resulted in a click.  Marketers now have the ability to attribute specific exposures to any number of desired actions on their website or landing page.  This in turn provides an opportunity for improved campaign stewardship
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The shear amount of content that is being created these days is overwhelming, especially online.  With all of this content comes the question of quality.  The quality of content within most magazines has always been seen as highly credible.  As this content moves online, magazines have the unique opportunity to offer customized advertising solutions that surround high quality content – a win, win for advertisers and publications alike.
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Banner ad click-through rates have consistently been on the decline since 2004 and it is no surprise that marketers are taking notice.  Throughout the early years of online banner advertising click-through rate was the only metric available to marketers, campaigns success and failure were based solely on the ratio of clicks to impressions.

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Online market research is not a new phenomenon and if you’re not using web 2.0 as a platform for this research you could be missing out.  As web traffic steadily increased, major market research and polling firms like Zogby and Harris Interactive added online systems to their suite of services, allowing them to provide a quicker, less expensive alternative to traditional research studies.  Also, online survey application start-ups like Survey Monkey and Zoomerang flourished but with all of this came risk – quality control.  Read the rest of this entry »