Nielsen and Facebook just released a collaborative study: Understanding the Value of a Social Media Impression. The study surveyed over 800,000 Facebook users and results show an increase in ad recall, brand awareness, and purchase intent when users see friends who have become fans of the brand in the ad. This is compelling data that backs up the main principle upon which SocialMedia.com was founded, which is: social ads perform better because they are a more personal, useful, and trusted form of advertising.

The research also revealed the high impact of campaigns that leverage a combination of paid media and earned media (i.e. ads drive users to become Facebook fans, and in turn users who become fans drive their friends to become fans). This type of social ad strategy is great because the positive effects of the campaign can be felt months after the campaign is over.

SocialMedia.com’s own experience and research has shown what the Nielsen study also demonstrates.  A 2009 SocialMedia.com/ Dynamic Logic study on social advertising reveals significant attitudinal lift across very similar categories. In particular we saw increases in brand awareness, brand favorability, and purchase intent among groups shown a social ad versus a non-social ad.

So yes, the study suggests that advertisers should consider social ads on Facebook, but advertisers should also be aware that social ads and their benefits don’t have to be limited to social networking sites. SocialMedia.com lets brands reap the benefits of social advertising beyond Facebook in 3 majors ways:

1. For every action that a user can take on a social network (share, like, rate, comment, consume, etc) we enable users to take the same action in social ads, creating a more engaging social experience. People want to share, because the more you share the more credibility you gain in the social sphere.
2. Similar to Facebook ads, users’ actions in our ads get pushed out into their social networks expanding a brand’s reach and creating real, organic messages about brands that appear in users’ news feeds, twitter streams, check-ins, etc.
3. Our technology discovers actions users take (not just in the ad unit, but also organically on social networks) and transforms those actions and messages into authentic sponsored content, feeding social data back into the ad. Because we gather and organize third party social data (Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare, etc) into a single technology engine, we offer the most complete social advertising solution that can’t be found anywhere else, even on Facebook.

And as I said in my comment on AdAge’s article on the study, “As long as we keep seeing impressive results and more studies like this one, we’ll keep repeating our mantra: In the future, ALL ads will be social.”

Is social media marketing and social advertising an intrusion to people’s privacy?

“Less and less so” is the answer given by Seth Goldstein, Co-Founder & Chairman of SocialMedia.com. And the reason is that people want to share more and more. Seth explains that, “sharing is the new currency of one’s personality”, the more you share the more credibility you gain in the social sphere.

People who don’t want to share aren’t using social media. Seth observes that “in the attention economy where influence is king, sharing information is outweighing users’ concerns about privacy.”

Check it out:

SocialMedia.com considers the protection of privacy to be of the utmost importance and only uses public content in ads or content that a user has opted-in to share.

BACKGROUND: Momentum Pictures approached MySpace UK looking for a powerful and personal way to promote the release of Youth In Revolt. Knowing that MySpace users in their teens rely upon each other for recommendations, MySpace suggested Social Interaction Ads, powered by SocialMedia.com.

SOLUTION: Social Interaction Ads engage users around a specific topic related to a product or service, encouraging users to share ideas and content with their friends. Nearly 1.5 million impressions were delivered across MySpace UK from January 21 - February 12, 2010. View a live demo of the ad here.

RESULTS: Across all impressions the social ad (word-of-mouth impression) performed significantly better than the non-social ad (opt-in impression). This high performance demonstrates the power and influence of a shared social message.

For more details,  best practices, and a graph of results please download the entire case study here (PDF).

4.26.10 UPDATE: The third video is now fixed and the sound works.

Seth Goldstein, Co-Founder & Chairman of SocialMedia.com presents “The Next Wave of Internet Advertising” at the IAB Annual Leadership meeting, February 2010 in Carlsbad, CA

In this first clip, Seth starts off his presentation about Ads 2.0 with a personal story about ads 1.0, or “the old way”.

Next, Seth discusses the characteristics of Ads 2.0 and social advertising.

And finally, Seth walks the audience through an example of Ads 2.0.

Since SocialMedia.com was founded in 2007, Seth Goldstein (Co-Founder & Chairman) has been predicting that “In the future, all ads will be social.” Seth isn’t alone anymore. Last week in a keynote presentation at OMMA Global, Neal Mohan (VP, Product Management at Google) listed several themes describing the future of advertising online, including  “every display campaign must be social.” Mohan pointed out the problem of banner blindness: “consumers have really learned to ignore all the banner ads they see on the Internet each day.”  The solution?  Social ads. Laurie Sullivan at MediaPost wrote more about Mohan’s presentation here.

UPDATE: 3.26.10. …and another one! Also at OMMA SF during a panel presentation, Joe Marchese, President of socialvibe, said, “All media is becoming social media, so if agencies can’t figure out how to buy it, the whole industry is going to be in a lot of trouble.” More on this panel presentation here.

Social Stream Ad Unit

Social is the new black

Consumers, advertisers, and publishers all want social. Why? Because social is better! Social ads are more personal, useful, and trusted.

For every action that a user can take on a social network (share, like, rate, comment, consume, etc) we enable them to take the same action in social ads — and these actions feed back into the ad creating authentic, sponsored content.

It’s harder and harder to find web pages that don’t let users interact in social ways. We think ads should be the same.

To demo some of our social ad products check out: clients.socialmedia.com/demo.

On Monday, February 22 SocialMedia.com announced the launch of the first technology platform that powers social ad solutions for publishers and their advertisers. Our announcement occurred at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting in Carlsbad, California.

“We partner closely with publishers, bringing them innovative ad products to capture the vast advertising opportunity in social media. Publishers get a solution that works well, works simply, and works at massive scale.”
- Kurt Abrahamson, CEO of SocialMedia.com

SocialMedia.com’s new platform enables publishers to bring the unique, vibrant voices of their communities to life through advertising. The platform transforms real messages from real people into authentic sponsored content. This unprecedented technology features social influence ranking and self-learning optimization that delivers the most relevant personal message to individual users.

“As a strategic partner with SocialMedia.com, we’re excited to leverage their more robust platform. IDG has seen substantial campaign lift for our clients with SocialMedia.com’s current product portfolio.”
- Jeremy Rueb, Vice President of IDG Strategic Marketing Services

We are the only company focused on providing publishers with custom, social advertising solutions enabling them to maximize the value from the communities on their sites.

The full press release is available here.

Social Hub. Click image for demo.

SocialMedia.com interviews new CEO, Kurt Abrahamson. Kurt comes to the SocialMedia.com team from Google where he led the product launch of Google AdSense. In this video, Kurt answers questions about his experience at Google and explains why he joined SocialMedia.com.