• There’s a column at iMedia Connection today called, bluntly, “Why Publishers Should Stop Selling Remnant Inventory.” Eric Picard explains how “liquidating all inventory at ‘any price’ is a horrible idea, and has led to many unintended consequences, namely driving a perception of ‘unlimited’ inventory out to the market” — among other things. What do you think? Share your views in the comments section.

• AdExchanger has published an interview with Joanna O’Connell, who led the team of analysts that created the Forrester Wave 2011 report on demand-side platforms that just dropped yesterday. As there’s some murmuring about whether or not Forrester took the right approach in ranking the DSPs, it’s worth a read.

• LinkedIn has rolled out a “polls” feature for LinkedIn Groups. The idea is that it’s a way of asking a question to a group of professionals in your network and having a discussion that’s as easy to participate in as clicking a button, but also has some degree of nuance. Anyone, not just a group manager, can create a poll, but moderators have the option of limiting poll creation to a much smaller segment if they’d like.

• AddThis has a new infographic about this year’s social sharing trends. Indulge in a bit of premature nostalgia and check it out:

1. Facebook will release a social browser. It makes too much sense for them not to. They have too much technology firepower to shy away from it. Facebook is already the center of so much internet behavior and so much marketing revenue migration that launching a browser is a logical evolution and a brilliant way to open a western front against Google. Imagine a Facebook search campaign. For marketers: Keep an eye out for rumors and identify customers that are early technology adopters.

2. B2B companies will start to take advantage of social media. This will be the start of new, smaller customer segments that have high value. LinkedIn is an excellent example of a leading player already utilizing this approach. BtoB plays will need to be rich in content, and offer high value for their followers.

3. Content Marketing will become critical to brand marketers. The brand is the media. The brand is no longer just a buyer of media. Social media is the place where brands will become more aggressive, and it could be the most important brand trend of the next year.

4. Data overload. What do you do with “big data?” Marketers were overwhelmed with the wealth of data provided when online advertising took off. It’s nothing compared to performance and audience data provided by traditional media these days. And it pales in comparison to the data now available thanks to social media. Expect the technologists to wear marketing hats and vice versa. Marketing will go from one of the hardest things to measure to one of the easiest.

5. The mobile floodgates will open. The numbers around mobile migration continue to be staggering. It will be well north of 50 percent by the end of 2012. The crossroads of mobile and social is an exciting opportunity for marketers, because for the first time a brand can create a bridge between the digital and physical worlds. Everything you have been accessing from your desktop will now be reaching you in-market while shopping, eating lunch with friends or at your kid’s soccer game.

6. Reanalysis of Customer Strategy. The overarching takeaway is that 2012 will be the year brands approach social media not as an experiment or as a race to get the most followers, but as a way to get to know the people who use it. It’s time to identify behaviors and attitudes, find differences in the customers that have them, and address them accordingly.

Save the IPO valuations for the analysts. It doesn’t matter to marketers as much as the real work of making social media a reliable and exciting way to reach the right customer at the right time: That’s the big news for 2012.

ADOTAS

Social media is the key to marketing, as it provides a way to stay connected with an audience on a daily basis. It is an effective means of communication that simultaneously allows businesses to brand themselves, develop personality and reach out to existing customers (to maintain loyalty) and potential new ones (to drive interaction and subsequent transactions).

For reasons that run the gamut from extremely personal to daily business and marketing functions, most of us spend at least a few minutes per day scouring and taking part in the online communities that have been built upon the social networking platforms.

More and more people around the world have come to understand the value of social media, and the growing audiences on these platforms are why businesses joined the social networking revolution in the first place: to be where the audience is. 800 million people and counting currently populate Facebook, around 40 million use Google+, 100 million people are actively tweeting, and over 100 million reportedly network (or have networked) on LinkedIn.

But what is social media integration? It is the act of spreading your brand across the popular social media platforms, and being active on all them. You can’t say you integrated social media marketing into your interactive campaign if all you have done is created presences on Facebook and Twitter and then never revisited them.

Posting on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and even Google + multiple times per day, interacting with and engaging your audience there (posting questions and doing what you can to attract and maintain the attention of customers and potential customers) and adding value with social media is what it takes to achieve true integration. Have an interesting idea for marketing? Turn it into a viral video and syndicate it on YouTube, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and even LinkedIn.

Different Networks, Different Strategies

Facebook is the place to foster long-term relationships with your target audience. Don’t just stop at getting them to like your page — keep them coming back with interesting information, engaging questions, fun videos and more. Make your presence known there, as well: answer questions, respond diplomatically to both positive and negative feedback, and most important, stay consistent with the image of your brand that you have built up elsewhere.

On Twitter, people are visiting to quickly scan the thoughts of those they are following. The most successful companies on Twitter are those who respond to customers and those talking about them, joining the conversation no matter what the subject matter. Airlines like Delta are especially good at this; they are manning the Twitter desks at all hours of the day, watching for those who mention them and responding with whatever helpful service the company can provide. Further, Twitter is a good place to tease a blog post. Provide a great lead-in few words, and then provide a link to the post.

On LinkedIn, you’re going to want to maintain relationships with business contacts, post blogs that may be relevant to your peers in your industry, and start educational conversations that can carry over to other social platforms. For instance, poll your industry friends on Facebook, and then take whatever subject you polled and say something like, “many of our friends on LinkedIn said that… what do you think?” LinkedIn is a great place for professional collaboration, as well as an important place for your business to show that it is authoritative.

Finally, Google+: though it is still up and coming, it can be beneficial for any company representative to jump on this bandwagon now and learn the ropes. Brand pages will be arriving soon, but before they do you can still join as a representative of your company, and reach out to various circles: friends, coworkers, people from other companies, etc. Then, share your content with these circles! It’s a wonderful tool for content syndication.

Plus, Google + posts are already integrated with search results, and you can bet they will only continue to be more so as Google works out the kinks. Further, when brand pages do arrive, you’ll be able to host hangouts with your customers, bringing interaction and engagement to an entirely new height. Check out Ford’s test account for an example of this type of thing done correctly.

Share and Share Alike

Social media integration will not only benefit your company’s marketing and branding efforts, but it can also help your SEO. Google likes to see companies having “wide footprints” – meaning they are proving their authority in many different ways, on many different platforms. Syndicating interesting articles on social media that are pertinent to your industry, written by you or not, will better show Google that you know what’s important in your niche, that you are an authority in your field, and that you are looking to share good content in an effort to engage and inform others.

• Business-oriented social network LinkedIn has introduced status updates for company pages, as well as a certified developer program to help marketers and agencies connect with developers (such as charter partner Buddy Media) who can develop social applications for the LinkedIn platform.

• Through its new Total Audience Guarantee (TAG) program, video ad network BrightRoll guarantees a certain number of impressions will reach the target audiences (segmented by age, gender and geographic data), which is verified through comScore’s AdEffx Campaign Essentials. Video advertisers are then only charged for impressions that actually reach target audiences.

• Following new deals with advertisers like Google, FedEx and Adobe, Online and offline experiential marketing agency MKTG INC (previously known as CoActive Marketing Group) has a new executive vice president of sales in Brian Duffy, who moved over from executive vice president and managing director at Ignited. In addition, Lindsay Rowe has been promoted from brand ambassador to director of sales and marketing.

• Mobile ad network Mojiva has three new members on its advisory board: Mike Perlis, president and CEO of Forbes Media; Mike LaSalle, a partner at Shamrock Capital Advisors who also serves on the boards of INgrooves, Media Storm and Harlem Globetrotters International; and Will Wynperle, another Shamrock partner on the boards of K2 Towers and Media Storm. Earlier this week, Mojiva ad-serving arm Mocean Mobile opened the Publisher Annex, a consortium of mobile solutions companies (including Golden Gekko and Zumobi) that will provide whitepapers and event demonstrations to educate mobile publishers and devlopers.

• Experimenting with an in-banner 300 X 250 video ad, blurbIQ, which overlays questions within videos to test audience reception of brand messages, found that its “interrupting” ads had a 38% interaction rate, compared to the “industry average” of  4% (determined through a “bake-off” with a host of vendors including DoubleClick). In addition, blurbIQ’s video completion rate was over 65% (compared to 43%) and the click-through rate was 2.5% (versus 0.18%).

• A survey of 700 senior marketers (both in-house and agency) by the Branding Forward Project, a joint initiative between branding agency Mechanica and Fast Company magazine, found that 51% believe consumer-generated marketing is inherently more relevant and effective, compared to 49% who prefer the traditional agency creative approach.

• Interpublic Group has acquired social marketing agency Spring Creek Group (cofounded by Clay Daniels in 2006) through its media holding company, IPG Mediabrands. Spring Creek will keep its name and operate as part of the Mediabrands Audience Platform (previously The Audience Platform).

1. 1. “Let’s let users upload media in digital form, and then sell it back to them in print form!”
   2. “Let’s get famous online so we get a book deal/TV show!”

These models are easy to understand, and the second model is especially compelling to people who didn’t make it in traditional media. But there’s a hidden game theory aspect to the whole situation: the more people pursue these models (basically “Build a product/marketing arm online, then take it to the real world!”), the less the “real world” will matter.

Take ICanHasCheezburger as an example. It’s a blog network with a few business models: sell rock-bottom CPM-based ads (to big-brand folks looking for awareness, affiliates just running the numbers, or retargeters), and occasionally sell books. But every new site they create drags a little more leisure time towards the web, rather than towards books.

Or consider the @shitmydadsays Twitter account. Their business model involved creating a popular Twitter account and using it to promote a book and then a TV show. But if social interaction is intrinsically more interesting than TV, this had a nasty side effect: it made every TV show incrementally less popular.

This gets more compelling when you look at capital costs and marginal costs. Twitter was cheap to start — their founder returned capital early on — and the marginal cost of one new Twitter account is zero. So in an environment where media dollars in general are dwindling, or where there’s more net demand for the same number of leisure minutes, TV will die out first.

A huge number of online businesses rely on this dynamic. Every one of them will some day need to alter their business model or shrink dramatically:

• LinkedIn gets lots of money from traditional recruiters and HR departments. LinkedIn is making both of those businesses partly obsolete.
• ShutterFly sells physical prints of digital pictures. (Startup Picplum does, too, and seems to do it better. And Smilebox, recently acquired for up to $40 million, has a similar model.) Every Shutterfly user is someone less likely to end up needing prints.
• Zoove sells vanity phone numbers. This is apparently a lucrative business, but how many people will be explicitly thinking about phone numbers five or ten years from now? It’ll be like having a punny IP address.
• Chegg basically turned textbooks into a Software-as-a-Service model that happened to involve printers. Now they’re moving online.

These are generally good businesses. They bolt the world’s best user acquisition model onto an established monetization strategy, and it works. But every one of these companies has an expiration date: a long-term buy on ShutterFly is a bet on a forthcoming business that doesn’t even exist yet.

Tune in tomorrow for Hobart’s list of anti-cannibal online businesses. Cross-published at the Digital Due Diligence blog. Sign up for the Digital Due Diligence newsletter here.

Usually.

But there’s a twist: sometimes, the economics of accumulating links will swamp the economics of monetizing them. This shows up in a weak form in plenty of affiliate-dominated verticals: AdWords ads point to a product page, but organic results point to a review that then pushes the searcher to a product page.

There’s one vertical where this model used to work quite well, but broke down in the late 2000s: searches for people’s names. A few years ago, nearly any name search would lead to an affiliate page promoting one of these services:

• Background checks.
• Family tree information.

Now, a search for most names will yield a different mix:

• A smattering of high-tier social networks (likely Facebook and Twitter).
• A paid social network like MyLife.
• LinkedIn, which will often be #1.

What happened?

LinkedIn is not a natural top result, in the sense that it monetizes far worse than background checks or family trees. But it’s a natural top search result in the sense that LinkedIn has relentlessly focused on SEO for names.

Their entire site architecture is focused on passing link equity from the homepage to as many profiles as possible, and their homepage naturally accumulates links (LinkedIn is a newsworthy topic). Moreover, their embeddable widgets create targeted links pointing directly to an individual user’s profile page. And the most common place to embed one of those links is on a domain that the user controls—which will be authoritative on the topic of that person’s name.

Essentially, LinkedIn has learned to arbitrage vanity in order to replace high-monetization clicks with high-interest clicks. The revenue is a fraction of what their older competitors would get; things look better from a lifetime value perspective, but probably not by much.

The paid social networks are an interesting exception. They monetize well, but aren’t especially linkable. The answer here may be advertising: MyLife runs banners and TV ads, cranking up their name recognition and thus their click-through rate. The margins are tighter and the revenue is front-loaded compared to LinkedIn, but in a sense it’s a similar strategy: their are linkable enough and clickable enough to get by without monetizing quite as well.

Could LinkedIn’s and MyLife’s competitors implement these strategies? It’s unlikely: LinkedIn has accumulated a massive head start, and the value proposition for embedding a link to a generic social profile is weaker than the value prop for embedding a link to a professional profile.

MyLife is in a weaker position, but there’s a paradox here: their strategy requires more care, investment, and fine-tuning to run profitably. A competitor would have to take bigger risks with more capital, just for a chance to be even. As with Groupon, doing a land-grab and then making the business worse can be a good way to build a competitive moat.

Cross published at the Digital Due Diligence blog. Sign up for the Digital Due Diligence newsletter here.

In particular, the stock of business-oriented social network LinkedIn (LNKD) has been riding a royal roller coaster since its IPO in May — the stock was rolling above $100 before the massive sell-off last week and is now ranging between $80 and $85, which is well above the $60 low the stock saw in mid-June.

Certainly the whippy waters down on Wall Street have made IPO-ready companies have second thoughts about filing to go public — LivingSocial is reportedly having cold feet. However, investor eyes are on chief competitor Groupon, which released an updated S-1 filing with some surprising figures.

In particular, the company reported revenue of $878 million in Q211, up from $622 million in the first quarter, but had $102.7 million in operational losses (following a $117 million loss in Q111), due mainly to expansion of staff. In the last two years, the company has increased its staff from 37 employees t0 9,625. The company was able to shave marketing costs — from $208 million in Q111 to $170 million in Q211.

However, the number of domestic merchants signed up for exclusive arrangements fell slightly quarter to quarter — from 20,233 to 20,041. That may not seem significant, but this has always been a huge growth area for the company — merchants were at 10,115 in Q310 and 13,984 in Q410 — and a statistic that made you think less about the fact the company was spending more than a dollar for every dollar it took in.

On the other hand, international merchant deals are skyrocketing, blowing up from 20,672 in the first quarter to nearly 29,000 in the second. Considering how frantically Groupon has been acquiring to expand its international presence, we could guess that the company could see domestic business maxing out. At the same, it just introduced real-time deals through Groupon Now and partnerships with check-in based mobile social networks Foursquare and Loopt.

The company has also apparently downplayed references to a controversial accounting technique — adjusted consolidated segment operating income, or ASCOI — that did not include costs for new subscriber acquisitions; the first appearance of ASCOI is on page 32 of the S-1.

Adding a little insight into the company’s “unconventional” methods, the report includes this explanation:

We exclude those costs because, unlike our other marketing expenses, they are an up-front investment to acquire new subscribers that we expect to end when this period of rapid expansion in our subscriber base concludes and we determine that the returns on such investment are no longer attractive. While we track this management metric internally to gauge our performance, we encourage you to base your investment decision on whatever metrics make you comfortable.

Taken with the recent market troubles, this new S-1 doesn’t seem to inspire the kind of confidence that makes investors chomp at the bit. Then again, Groupon’s revenue for the first half of 2011 was $1.5 billion, compared to $131.5 million over the same period the year before. That’s massive growth, all right, but the real question is whether the spurt is over — especially as the stock market is on the verge of tanking.

As we noted last week, online ad tech firms such as ValueClick (VCLK) and Interclick (ICLK) have taken a bath with the rest of the NASDAQ. Yesterday’s late rally helped VCLK snap back from a daily nadir of $13.78 to close above $14.50; ICLK managed to climb to a $5.85 close after sinking to $5.43 in the afternoon. In July, VCLK reached a three-year high of $18.78 and ICLK hit its peak at $8.90. VCLK and ICLK were down 0.55% and 0.06% respectively as of press time.

The travel ad network cleverly known as Travel Ad Network has partnered with See Jane Fly, Inc., a  publisher network that seeks women looking for travel inspiration.

Willkommen, We Are Social! The self-proclaimed “conversation agency” has opened its fifth office world-wide in Munich, Germany.

And the winner is LinkedIn, beating Street expectations in its first earnings report with a revenue of $121 million.

Tokyo-based digital marketing agency iREP has chosen Kenshoo Social to manage client social advertising campaigns.

Almost a year of Epic effort has culminated in the media group’s migration to a new multichannel ad-serving platform that boasts an enhanced attribution analytics engine.

iBuildApp has introduced four new free Android app templates, including one for small businesses, restaurants, musicians and E-book publishers. No programming skills required.

While B2B marketers have already dabbled in setting up Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, an important question remains: are consumer social networks the best place to connect with business buyers? The truth is, probably not.

As marketers are beginning to understand, it’s more important to identify and engage with the social networks, communities and channels that are appropriately targeted for the audiences and influencers they are trying to reach.

That being said, here are three steps any B2B marketer can take to get their social initiatives off the ground:

Find the Right Network. It is important to evaluate which social networks and community hubs are most popular within your industry. Ask yourself, can a social network be used to engage my target customers? Is the network or application something my target audience uses regularly?

Targeted social networks already exist in several industries. Examples include LinkedIn Groups, Sermo for doctors, MFG.com for manufacturers and of course, my company, Spiceworks for Information Technology (IT) professionals.

Provide Value. In order to be successful at engaging your buyers socially, you need to offer something they want or need. Ask yourself, what are the pain points my industry is facing day-to-day and is there a way I can help? Finding avenues to simplify how customers do their jobs can go a long way to scoring social points. Examples can be as simple as answering questions about common problems to offering free apps that provide value (e.g. a free help desk for IT pros).

Track Results. The success of any B2B social marketing initiative is linked to your ability to measure results. Whether it’s an improvement in brand recognition, increase in website traffic or an uptick in sales, it’s important to track the impact of social campaigns.

Many social networks provide the tracking tools to quantify leads, market share and actual social transactions. Others let you measure and promote reputation to highlight the most valuable community members or content. Make sure you figure out the right ones that will work for you.

Once you determine where you should be connecting with your audience, here are additional steps you can take to market effectively in social business networks:

Listen. Marketers can use a variety of tools to gather feedback from people and determine sentiment. They can also proactively conduct surveys and polls, as well as, directly engage with social network users or groups to gather feedback on brand impressions, products or services.

Target. Tailoring your engagement with participants in a social network is key. Examples include showing ads or offers to people based on their expressed needs or likes and not just basic demographics. More sophisticated engagement options include interactive brand/vendor pages designed to serve as “hubs” for brands. These pages allow their representatives to communicate with fans and buyers, while also servicing customers within the social networks.

Transact. Social networks are evolving into marketplaces to conduct business. Giving participants a simple and efficient way to buy is becoming very important for B2B marketers to succeed in their social initiatives. There are a number of proven options available to marketers, including deals, offers, “buy” buttons and integrated e-commerce functionality to sell products and services directly in the social network platforms.

While emerging social business networks represent new territory for many B2B marketers, they are already showing great results for many early adopters.

Working with over 200 large technology vendors in our social business network for small business technology professionals, we’ve seen the B2B social options mentioned above not only drive engagement, but directly impact sales. In just 90 days, one brand was able to generate $15 of revenues for every $1 spent on social campaigns and engagements.

Clearly this type of return on investment makes figuring out how to effectively use social business networks a priority for B2B marketers. The challenge for them then remains simple: how to cut through the chatter to get their message and product to the right audience at the right time.

To start, I’d recommend that B2B marketers get out there and give it a try.

Facebook

Facebook is the biggest and best place to advertise in social media today. It has tons of members and the most developed advertising platform of all the social networks. However, since it’s still relatively new, ads on Facebook are still cheap, making it a great place to advertise over something like Google AdWords, which will cost you significantly more.

With Facebook you can focus on two areas: targeting groups or making a network. With targeted ads, you can take advantage of the massive amount of information Facebook has about all of it’s members, allowing you to focus on a truly impressive number of combinations of data (men over 50 who like smooth jazz, perhaps). In terms of making a network, you can make a page on Facebook and then pay to advertise that page and gain “likes,” thereby creating your own network of fans on Facebook that you can then communicate with.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a smaller, less diverse network than Facebook. You can do the same type of targeting of groups that you do with Facebook, but you won’t be able to choose from the wide range of topics that Facebook provides.

However, LinkedIn gives you a finer grain of targeting, so you can specifically advertise to people with, for example, a certain job title, like “Director of Operations.” It’s important to note that, as LinkedIn is made for business networking, that is the group that you’re advertising to; it’s either a perfect place or a horrible place to advertise your business depending on what you’re looking for and what you do.

Twitter

Twitter is a “special” case. It’s huge and has grown at an unprecedented rate in its five years of operation. Even though it has had great success, though, it has the least developed advertising platform of any of the networks. All you can do with Twitter is buy a sponsored tweet or pay to promote a trend on the main page.

Other than that, finding success with Twitter requires manually building up your network through gaining followers and following the right people in order to make your voice more prominent. The advantage of eventual Twitter success is the “snowball effect” that you can have: you tweet, your followers retweet, the followers of your followers retweet, etc.

Even better, people tweeting about you means you show up in searches about what you do. Someone searching for “sandwiches” will find your business if you get people tweeting about it, putting the message fully into the public rather than Facebook that is more focused on the immediate network of a person and their friends.

There’s your quick start guide to advertising in the social media world. The important thing with social media is to consider which network is the most appropriate for your business. In addition, you’ll want to make sure that you test your advertising strategy before jumping in completely. You don’t want to find yourself seeing no results from ads on a network you’ve put a lot of money and time into.

In the end, social media advertising is one of the cheapest and most efficient ways to put your business in the public eye, and you should definitely take advantage of it.