Category: News (page 4 of 1505)

Is social media sponsorship good practice?

Make money online is one of the most searched terms online, serving up millions of results, each more puzzling than the other. From MLM get rich quick schemes, to pay-per-post opportunities for bloggers, there’s nothing new under the sun, and nothing can surprise us anymore. When it comes to social media, however, many have hoped to keep things transparent, and genuine. A lost cause, as you will soon realize.

Last year in August, eMarketer ran a feature called How Valuable Are Social Media Sponsorships? The conclusions of that study were that blog posts and videos were the mentions with the most value, calculated to be $114.71 and $112.46, respectively, while Twitter edged out Facebook. Tweets were valued at $63.64, compared to $55.16 for a Facebook update. No wonder that so many companies are willing to pay people on social media directly, instead of investing in advertising.

Social media users are already being paid to “like” pages, to “follow” peers, and even to post opinions and “sponsored” entries. PaidPerTweet promises Twitter users up to $5 per tweet for tweets about web sites, products, services, and companies. Sponsored Tweets describes itself as eBay for tweets, promising cash as well. These are just two of the many similar services. Some require full disclosure, and a so-called code of ethics, others circumvent the rules. Even celebrities get paid to tweet, some exorbitant amounts, like Kim Kardashian with $10,000, for Shoedazzle.com; and Charlie Sheen with $50,000 per tweet, for Internships.com.

With Facebook, the situation is pretty similar. FanSlave pays users to “like” pages, but there are also companies that pay users to for Facebook shoutouts, although not many made this the core of their business. Till redKonnect.

Like Sponsored Tweets and PaidPerTweet, redKonnect promises Facebook users cash if they post about politicians, charitable causes, or brands they like. The service, which launches next week, was formed by BYU students Brock Luker and Trygve Jensen. An invitation-based beta version was launched last December, and the company gained popularity pretty quick – as expected with anything that promises compensation for social media activities of any kind. The problem with redKonnect is that it’s deceitfully advertising itself as new, innovative and a social media revolution, when, in fact, the company doesn’t bring anything new on the market, although they seem convinced that they are the first to offer individuals direct PayPal payments:

Similar companies, like Klout and Blue Calypso, reward social media influencers with discounts or on-site credit, but redKonnect is the first to offer individuals direct PayPal payments for their activity on the redKonnect site.

There are enough companies that pay directly. MyLikes is paying users to tweet, post a video on YouTube, post on tumblr or Facebook. The system is pretty standard: users are paid-per-click or per-view based on a quality score. Unlike MyLikes, who pay after a campaign, redKonnect allegedly pay users upfront, but also per-click and based on a quality score, which, according to a review at BYU’s online publication The Universe, is proprietary to redKonnect.

ad.ly works with the big dogs, or what they like to call “influencers.” You’ll find a tremendous amount of “names” on their list, including Paris Hilton, Mariah Carey, Jessica Alba, Lindsay Lohan and so on. These are some of the celebrities who get paid to tweet – the non-celebs can be found close to the end of the list.

IZEA is by far the most popular in Social Media Sponsorships. The company was once “PayPerPost” but rebranded as soon as more opportunities arrived. They still compensate bloggers, tweeters and mobilers for sponsored blog posts, tweets and actions via three different services: SocialSpark, Sponsored Tweets and WeReward. The list could go on forever, and maybe end with Warner Brother’s Word of Mouth Marketing which pays “social media superstars” to post on Twitter and Facebook about WB shows.

Whether these services mean “the kiss of death for Facebook ads” (as in the title of a recent redKonnect release) is not even debatable. They are not. They provide an alternative channel for advertisers who don’t rely on ads for their campaigns.

Are sponsored social mentions more effective than traditional ads? Now this is a matter of debate. Generally speaking, it all depends on the purpose. Traditional ads have a more powerful subliminal effect, while sponsored social mentions bring immediate results.

Will companies like redKonnect, MyLikes, and the lot, thrive in the future? They sure will. And there’s enough room on the market to welcome competition and copycats.

LinkedIn has proven to be a fruitful lead source for thousands of companies. So fruitful in fact, its paid advertising program has helped grow the company’s revenue in 2011 at a faster rate than Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Why are marketers flocking to LinkedIn paid advertising? They are using LinkedIn pay per click (PPC) because it simply works. As compared to Facebook and Google PPC, LinkedIn provides much better ad targeting for B2B companies. Click through rates also tend to be much greater for B2B companies. Below are nine steps to help craft the perfect targeted LinkedIn PPC campaign.

1. Define target demographics and build buyer personas
   Aside from the typical persona building process, it’s important to identify at least one of the following:  ideal verticals, geography, function (title), company or what LinkedIn Groups the target may be a member of. These are the attributes chosen in order to target ads. The goal of the campaign will determine the combination of attributes used for targeting.
2. Identify their problems
   This is critical because people only go to the web to solve their problems and/or to be entertained. It’s the problems identified and the ad’s perceived solution to these problems that will motivate defined personas to click-through to the landing page.
3. Create opt-in content that solves their problems
   This is the product that powers the quid pro quo transaction on the landing page. The visitor’s email address and other form fields on the landing page are the currency for the transaction. Ad copy should market this piece of content.
4. Develop a landing page for the problem solving content
   This is where the quid pro quo transaction occurs via a form. Each landing page developed for the campaign should follow best practices for conversion and have a trackable URL that identifies traffic from the LinkedIn ad.
5. Set up A/B or multivariate tests for the landing page
   Small variations in a landing page, such as copy, layout, color or graphics, to name a few, can have a big impact on its ability to convert a visitor. Some tests show modest improvements while others double or even triple conversion rates. It is recommended to have an ongoing landing page testing program.

6. Create a lead nurturing campaign
   According to HubSpot, 96% of first time website visitors are not ready to buy yet. These people fit squarely into the top of the sales funnel or are simply not qualified at all. Lead nurturing is an automated process using email to gently encourage individuals who convert on a landing page to consume more content, get to know the brand better and qualify themselves while moving southward in the sales funnel.
7. Write a minimum of three ad variations to execute testing
   The purpose of creating three ads is to test their ability to convince someone to click on them. LinkedIn will randomly rotate between the ads while tracking their performance. Ad copy should contain a call-to-action and value proposition. The value proposition should focus on solutions to the above identified problems. When a clear winner is identified in the testing process, dump the losers and create two new ads that mirror some of the attributes of the winner and continue testing.

8. Create at least one attention grabbing graphic (50×50 pixels)
   LinkedIn allows for a small graphic to be included with each ad. Multiple images can be an additional testing attribute as described above. Try to use graphics that are simple yet attention-grabbing to the eye.
9. Rinse and repeat…

If after deploying the above techniques the campaign produces mediocre results, go back through every step and reassess them. Not everyone will hit a home run their first at bat, but rest assured the above techniques are tried and true. For help with using LinkedIn for organic social media lead development, download our LinkedIn Marketing Cheat Sheet.

This article originally appeared on Inbound Marketing Agency Blog and has been republished with permission.

Find out how to syndicate your content with Business 2 Community.

Everyone has a defense against pre-roll ads, those video advertisements you are forced to watch before enjoying a YouTube video or online news report. Some mute their computers; others play a little Spider Solitaire until the ad is over; still others just force themselves to space out until the content actually begins, magically snapping back to reality once the pre-roll ad has finished.

Solve Media, a digital advertising firm, is trying to live up to its name, trotting out a new solution that aims to please both advertisers who want to get their message across as well as online video watchers who hate the ads that delay their chosen content.

Aol Ventures, whose parent company, Aol, also owns HuffPost, is an investor in Solve Media.

Solve Media’s newest idea is simple: Users can skip pre-roll ads and get straight to their video by typing a few magic words into a box and pressing enter. Those magic words? The slogan, jingle, or “brand message” of the company whose advertisement they’re currently watching.

In other words, if you’re faced with (hypothetically) a 30-second GMC ad before a YouTube video, you can type in “We are professional grade” and be done with it.

If a Marshall’s ad pops up before footage of last night’s debate flub, type in “Never pay full price for fabulous” and get to the gaffes.

If Apple bombards you with a Siri ad when you’re just trying to watch the slam dunk of the night, type in “Call me Rock God” and get to the dunk-age.

Solve Media’s “pre-roll insurance technology” rolls out immediately with pilot partners AOL, Expedia, General Motors and more. Peter Kafka of AllThingsD points out that this is not Solve Media’s first attempt at making web users input ad slogans: The company also launched an advertising product that replaced CAPTCHAs — those random numbers or letters you occasionally have to type in to prove you’re human when signing up for an account or leaving a comment on a website — with branded messages.

Solve Media joins other high-profile advertisers searching for ways to improve advertising on online videos. Streaming behemoth Hulu rolled out its Ad Swap in October 2011, which allows users to choose which companies’ advertisement they’d like to watch along with their web videos; advertising group AdoTube unveiled the “Polite Pre-Roll” in September 2010, which let users “minimize” the pre-roll ad and go straight to the video, with a pop-up reminding them to watch the advertisement later.

For advertisers, the stakes are high. A report from AccuStream Research found that advertisers spent about $1.56 billion in pre-roll advertising in 2011, a number expected to increase every year into 2014. Solve Media (who — caveat! — also has a stake in proving that ineffective pre-roll advertising is costing companies money) also estimates that companies are wasting up to $33 per second on “skipped or ignored” pre-roll ads in the United States; since YouTube began allowing its users to skip pre-roll ads, meanwhile, it has seen average skip rates of around 70 percent, and up to 80 percent, according to 2011 research by YouTube cited by Solve.

For consumers, meanwhile: Well, the stakes are low. We just want our video to start, right? To that end, web entrepreneurs have been waging a battle against online ads for years, recently setting their sights on video advertisements. Firefox add-on AdBlock Video, for example, was developed solely to block video ads and can stop pre-roll ads on YouTube, CNN, Fox News and the video players of the four major networks; the AdBlock Plus extension for Google Chrome added video ad blocking capabilities in September 2011. Hulu fought back against these extensions later that month, changing its site and rendering the ever-popular AdBlock ineffective at blocking its pre-roll ads.

That defensive change in Hulu’s website is indicative of just how important these pre-roll ads are to both advertisers and the websites that depend on them for revenue. And with the war between advertisers (Watch our ads!) and web surfers (Just show us the video!) raging on, Solve Media is seeking a middle ground: We’ll show you the video immediately, but you have to type in this advertising slogan first. If they are successful, you can practice typing “Call me Rock God” as quickly as you can starting right now.

You can try out this technology for yourself — by which we mean, you can go watch an advertisement using type-to-skip — at Solve Media’s website here. And for an overview of the technology itself, and why it might be useful for both advertisers and consumers, check out this snazzy video that Solve Media put together below:

Solving the Pre-Roll Blues from Solve Media on Vimeo.

Also on HuffPost:

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Should restaurants and retail shops buy ads on Yelp? About 70 percent of the review site’s revenue comes from local advertising, according to the prospectus Yelp filed ahead of its public listing Friday. Since those ads are the core of Yelp’s business, if they don’t work, it’s bad news for merchants and investors alike. While 529,000 businesses have “claimed” their free Yelp listings, only 19,000 of them pay to dress up their profiles and place ads on other Yelp pages.

Businesses spend an estimated $136 billion on local advertising. Much of that money goes to newspapers and the Yellow Pages, though a growing share is spent online. Yelp bills its strength as reaching “potential consumers at the specific moment when they are searching for a local business” and appears positioned to gain from that growth.

“The discovery of business products and services has absolutely moved online,” says Niel Robertson, founder and chief executive of Trada, which helps small businesses advertise on search engines and Facebook (though not on Yelp). Robertson, who once opened restaurants in Boston and Boulder, Colo., said a decade ago he would advertise in the Boston Globe and other papers. Now a restaurateur opening a new brunch spot can advertise on a smorgasbord of sites to reach diners when they’re looking online for places to eat, not just when they’re reading a newspaper.

Two of Yelp’s biggest competitors, Google and Facebook, are also hungry for local ad dollars. Unlike Google search ads, which cost buyers only when someone clicks on them, Yelp advertisers buy contracts to display a certain number of ads, whether or not anyone clicks. Rocky Agrawal, a blogger and marketing consultant in San Francisco, says Yelp essentially gouges small business customers too unsophisticated to know better. (Yelp, which is in a quiet period before its IPO, declined to comment for this story.)

Writing in VentureBeat, Agrawal calculated that Yelp is charging businesses $367 to $600 per 1,000 ad impressions, based on rate quotes forwarded to him by an unnamed business. “They’re about 1,000 times more expensive than typical online advertising rates,” he told me. Compare that with Facebook ads that cost pennies but don’t entice many people to click.

Yelp’s cost is higher partly because “Yelp advertising is sold and not bought,” Agrawal says. Unlike Google and Facebook, where businesses design ad campaigns without ever interacting with a human being, Yelp relies on a sales force and call centers to reach local businesses.

There’s little in Yelp’s filings to gauge how effective its ads are for the businesses that buy them. Reviews and visitors have climbed, as have paying advertisers and the number of businesses that have “claimed” their free Yelp listings. All that growth has taken place as Yelp expands into new cities, however, so it’s hard to infer whether the site is retaining customers and persuading them to increase their advertising spending. How the company, which has yet to turn a profit, will do after its IPO depends on it.

Adobe
announced that its digital media push is paying off with serious momentum in
its digital publishing products, additional HTML5 support, enhanced video and
developer tools support.

At Mobile World Congress
(MWC) 2012 in Barcelona, Spain, Adobe Systems announced that more than 16
million digital publications were powered by its Adobe
Digital Publishing Suite across tablets over the last year. The company
also released key information about digital magazine and newspaper application
usage, based on anonymous data aggregated from nearly 600 publishers worldwide that
have created around 1,500 tablet publications using the Adobe Digital
Publishing Suite.

In
addition, Adobe announced new innovations that add more enterprise-class
functionality and extensibility to the Digital Publishing Suite, helping
organizations drive digital revenue and brand engagement through digital
publications. Key enhancements include new in-app merchandising, provisioning
of targeted content based on user role and accelerated app creation.

The
anonymous, aggregate data is derived from publications delivered using the Adobe
Digital Publishing Suite and shows shifts in reading patterns, willingness to
pay for tablet applications, accelerated purchase funnel and advertising
engagement.

In a call
with reporters, Danny Winokur, vice president and general manager of
Interactive Development at Adobe, said tablets are driving new revenue for
publishers as consumers pay for digital media content. Business publishers are
also using tablet applications to drive awareness of their brands as well as
the purchase of goods and services. Winokur said 68 percent of readers
worldwide currently pay for digital magazines and newspapers built with the
Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. This is made up of single-issue purchases (15
percent), subscriptions (26 percent), and bundles of print and digital issues
(27 percent).

In
addition, readers are highly engaged with both editorial and advertising
content, Winokur said. Every fifth page view in a Digital Publishing Suite
magazine app is an advertisement. Interactivity—which includes Web views,
videos, slide shows, audio clips, image sequences, hyperlinks and other
overlays—can also have a profound impact on a reader’s digital content
consumption and engagement, with readers interacting with nearly half (48
percent) of all interactive features in Digital Publishing Suite apps, he said.
Out of the variety of interactive overlays included in applications, Web views
and videos are the two types most frequently accessed by readers.

Moreover,
more than half (56 percent) of readers spend between 25 minutes to 2.5 hours a month
reading their digital titles. Time spent consuming content has increased 70
percent over the last six months, which can be attributed to more sophisticated
and engaging content as well as the continued adoption of tablets. Consumers
tend to open a Digital Publishing Suite application up to five times per month
on average, and 9 percent of readers spend more than 5 hours per month reading
digital titles, which suggests that they are frequently engaging on a tablet
with the brands they enjoy.

“We
saw 16 million digital publications downloaded over the last 12 months, with no
signs of fatigue,” said Zeke Koch, senior director of product management
for Digital Publishing at Adobe, in a statement. “As digital issues grow
significantly, Adobe will continue to fuel this evolution by providing
innovative features that allow publishers and corporations worldwide to drive
digital revenue, accelerated readership and purchase of content.”

Publishers
such as Rodale and Active Interest Media and companies like Sotheby’s have
recently published magazine, merchandising and customer loyalty applications.
Similarly, enterprises now have the opportunity to add digital content into
their mobile marketing mix by creating a broad range of digital publications
using Digital Publishing Suite, including sales and marketing collateral,
corporate communications, as well as brand loyalty, customer acquisition and
customer retention materials.

“Adobe
Digital Publishing Suite has allowed us to amaze and satisfy our readers with
technological innovation that they crave and expect,” said Anthony
Cerretani, deputy editor and digital director at Backpacker Magazine, in a
statement. “We’ve been able to integrate interactive maps, adventure
videos from all over the world, and touch-point-powered content that inspires
and enables our readers to experience outdoor adventure in incredibly dynamic
ways. They’re even contributing multimedia to our editions on a regular basis.
With the flexibility of Adobe’s tools, we’re finding new ways to optimize the
experience every month.”

“As
we focus on reaching our increasingly global client base, Adobe Digital
Publishing Suite provides an elegant platform and enjoyable user experience,”
said Amy Todd Middleton, worldwide director of marketing for Sotheby’s, in a
statement. “Our Sotheby’s catalogue app combines the visual aesthetic
of our print catalogues in a new convenient digital format. Analytics show
that people are spending more time browsing our content offline in a more
interactive environment. With zoom, original videos and 360-degree
photography, it is a great alternative to being in the room with a work of art.”

Key
features in the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite include:

• Restricted Distribution—Publishers can
  provision specific content to a variety of customer, reader or member groups
  within one branded application.
• Custom Notifications—Customers can
  leverage in-app notifications to cross-promote and market availability of
  publications and other content. Already embraced by select Condé Nast
  publications, publishers and brand organizations can use custom notifications
  as in-app marketing to drive demand for magazine issues.
• HTML5 Support—Publishers such as The
  New Yorker and National Geographic are using HTML5 within their digital
  publications for in-app custom storefronts, inline content and complete
  articles. Similarly, advertisers are including HTML5 within interactive
  advertisements to drive consumer engagement.
• Other
  enterprise-class features include Direct
  Entitlement (publishers can provide digital content to existing
  subscribers in one click), Analytics
  (Digital Publishing provides both Base Analytics as well as the ability to
  integrate with an existing SiteCatalyst account) and Custom Content Viewer (publishers can create a Content Viewer for
  multiple devices that supports full-screen viewing of content).