Last month, SocialMedia.com created an engaging social ad unit for 1-800-Flowers. Kevin Ranford, Director of Web Marketing at 1-800-Flowers.com explained:

“You need to get folks engaged. We have had some significant wins with our social media programs, so how do you get that type and level of interaction in our various ad buys? When SocialMedia.com approached us, we thought it was a great way to achieve this.”

SocialMedia.com’s custom social ad combined the performance power of Social Overlay with the branding power of a Twitter stream. The Social Overlay displayed a dynamic and targeted social message relevant to each user, and the Twitter stream showed real messages about 1-800-Flowers, from real users on Twitter. Users could navigate between the two screens in the ad unit.Results show significant CTR lift when comparing the original ad unit to the Overlay ad unit and the Overlay+Twitter ad unit.

Results:

The original, non-social version of the ad.

The ad impression with Social Overlay saw a 23% lift in CTR compared to the original ad

The ad impression with Social Overlay and Twitter Stream saw a 72% lift in CTR compared to the original.

InternetRetailer.com wrote more about this successful campaign in a May article which can be downloaded here (pdf).

SocialMedia.com is excited to be invited to exhibit at the OMMA Global conference March 17-18 in San Francisco. With 75 sponsors handpicked to exhibit and over 3,000 media and marketing professionals expected to attend, it should be a terrific show!

The best part of the show is that MediaPost is making the entire event FREE this year! If you haven’t signed up yet you can still do so here.

SocialMedia.com will have a booth in the main expo hall (#320) where we’ll be showing off our new ad technology platform with interactive demos of our social ads.

As mentioned in the blog title we’ll also be giving away a free iPad! To enter the drawing all you need to do is participate in our “social targeting” bean bag toss game. By playing the game you will also have a chance to win other prizes –  if your aim is good!

So please stop by our booth to say hi and check out our ads. We hope to see you there!

Social media defines a new era of online advertising

As Facebook, Twitter, and other social media have become important in our lives, we have come to expect a similar social experience when interacting with all digital content — including ads. This presents advertisers with a huge challenge, but also an opportunity to engage online audiences in new and compelling ways. Transparency, responsiveness, genuine dialogue, and ethics take center stage in the battle for revenue.

At the same time, Web 2.0 has birthed a new breed of company, while changing many established company’s attitudes toward their customers. This new mindset will lead to a generation of advertising in which good companies are selling good products and services to exactly the people who want them, bringing word of mouth into a new era.

Social ads are Ads 2.0

Ads 2.0, the next generation of ads, are moving away from static, impersonal, mass-produced propaganda, to dynamic, customized, personal content.  Similarly, social ads are a more useful, relevant, and personal type of advertising which benefits publishers and advertisers, as well as users. That’s why we are excited to be creating social ads that transform real messages from real people into authentic sponsored content.

Seth Goldstein (Co-Founder and Chairman of SocialMedia.com) introduced our vision of Ads 2.0 at the 2010 IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. His slides from the presentation are available on SlideShare here. A recap of the event can be found on the IAB’s website here.

SocialMedia.com is excited to announce that we’ve hired a great media exec to join the company as CEO. His name is Kurt Abrahamson and he comes most recently from Google where he worked for Tim Armstrong and helped launch AdSense. His experience is perfectly suited to what we are trying to accomplish with our social advertising platform for publishers.

Seth Goldstein has transitioned to the role of Chairman, where he will work closely with Kurt and the team to continue advancing our position in the emerging social media marketing industry and cultivating key customer relationships.

Seth said: “We are fortunate to have somebody join our team who understands the complex needs of media companies. Kurt’s work at Google with publishers will be of great value as we continue to scale our business.”

Kurt added: “Just as with AdSense where publishers were able to monetize directly from paid search, SocialMedia.com is helping publishers do the same from social media. I’m excited to be bringing this social advertising platform to life. It’s the first of its kind enabling publishers to offer social advertising solutions at scale.”

Kurt comes to SocialMedia.com from Google where he first served as Director of the Content Media Group, leading the global launch of Google AdSense. Kurt managed the direct sales channel for publishers and secured long-term deals with five of the top ten web properties. He also served as the Director of Global Sales & Operations Strategy and as Director of Sales Operations for North America.

Prior to working at Google, Kurt served as COO of Jupiter Communications and President of Jupiter Media Metrix from 1994 to 2003. He helped build Jupiter’s business from a 12-person office to one of the leading Internet research organizations, with over 520 employees worldwide. He grew and guided the sales team to secure over 40% market share, establishing Jupiter’s position as one of the leading sources of Internet research.

Ever since our company started with Trakzor, Foodfight and Appsaholic back in 2007, we have pivoted the business a number of times to stay ahead of the curve. Based on our experience prototyping solutions for companies like MySpace and IDG, not to mention what we learned over two years from our Facebook campaigns, we have been busy coding an entirely new technology platform that we plan to release at the end of Q1. It will be the first solution for publishers that enables the authoring, serving and reporting of social ads — ads that aren’t just shouting for attention, but have real people saying real things about brands.

Full Press Release

We’re excited to announce the formal launch of our newest product, Twitter Sparq. As the name suggests, we’re “sparking” conversations within Twitter in a natural, authentic way. We see this as another step in one of the many ways that the advertising world is converging. Traditional, tried and true tools for advertising are merging with the brave new world of social, conversational media and we’re creating tools like Sparq for advertisers to reach their consumers.

The basic idea behind Sparq is actually pretty simple. An advertiser creates an “ad” which is essentially a text-based prompt that asks a user a question and encourages them to share their opinion. That tweet is distributed to their followers and multiple conversations are sparked, resulting in awareness for the brand’s message and click-thrus to the landing page for those curious to learn more.

Behind this simple idea, there is actually a lot going on behind the scenes. We’ve designed a self-serve interface to keep up with the dynamic nature of the product, there’s keyword targeting to strengthen prompt relevancy to the end users, and analytics on the backend to report # of tweets, the audience for those messages, and click thru statistics.

We’ll be looking to scale up our publisher inventory to keep pace with our new advertisers, so please email us at sparq@socialmedia.com to learn more! We currently welcome all types of publishers, and are actively exploring the ways in which Twitter Sparq will drive maximum value for publishers and advertisers. If you’re looking to effectively monetize your client in a way that only adds to your user experience, this is the way to go!

We wanted to give as many advertisers as possible a chance to try out Sparq, so we’re going to open this up as a free trial for the next 2 weeks. So log-in and start sparking conversations about your brand today!