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.

Forecasts and predictions about twenty-ten are EVERYWHERE. We looked deep into our crystal ball here at SocialMedia.com, but it seems someone swapped it for a beach ball.

So rather than try to guess the future, we put together a list of five emerging trends that are already stirring up social advertising. To be successful in 2010, you must plan for how these trends will impact your business.

1. No stone is left unturned when it comes to finding social data.

Social networks are gaining a larger chunk of online advertising dollars, in large part due to the effectiveness of using social data from these sites to deliver targeted brand messages. But data from social graphs is not exclusive to social networks. As more money shifts to social networks, traditional publishers will want to get a piece of the action.

TAKEAWAY: To offer social data to advertisers, publishers are working hard to uncover and grow their existing social graphs – and succeeding. Don’t get left behind.

2. Social relationships are more than just friends.

At SocialMedia.com, we break social relationships down into one of three categories: friends, influencers, and communities.

• Friends are the easiest to spot; they are a one-to-one connection, approved by both parties (e.g. connections on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Foursquare, etc.).
• Influencers are characterized by a one-to-many relationship, bloggers and micro-bloggers being the best examples. For instance, a wine lover blogs about new wines she has discovered and others wine drinkers read her blog and view her opinions as a trusted source of information, even though she does not know the identity of all her readers.
• Communities include individuals who are largely anonymous to each other, but relate to the group around a similar interest (characterized by a many-to-many relationship). For example, fans of new TV show might discuss recent episodes in a discussion forum. In this particular case the community may only last for the duration of the television series. In other cases, the community relationship may persist much longer, e.g. moms trading advice on a website dedicated to parenthood.

TAKEAWAY: Because communities have been largely overlooked as a significant social relationships, there is a tremendous opportunity to execute social campaigns on sites other than social networks, where the voice of a given site and/or community is leveraged as a whole. This opportunity appears even more promising when advertisers consider the upward trend of online users embracing social activities and identifying with online communities. (We believe that the nuances of social relationships are so important that we’ll be following up with another blog post that digs deeper into this topic).

3. Consumers turn to online social connections for recommendations.

The rapid growth (not to mention sheer number) of social media users is bolstering the credibility and perceived value of social media channels, tools, and most importantly, content. This larger base of active users allows people to connect with virtual peer groups in more niche categories. For example, a foodie follows a list of local restaurant critics on twitter, a CIO joins a LinkedIn group for IT leaders and discusses cloud computing, an indie rock fan blogs about new bands and other indie rock fans read her posts. These connections are real and authentic (establishing trust) and are hyper-targeted, which means users get highly tailored opinions by turning to these groups.

TAKEAWAY: More open-minded consumers actively seeking advice and recommendations from online peer groups, creates a gold mine for advertisers who can be armed and ready with real brand messages from real people.

4. Online endorsements are happening in real time.

Not only are more consumers using online social connections as an input for decision-making, but when they do they are also finding real-time information from other consumers. Reviews of retail locations are posted before consumers even leave the stores. Bad (and good) customer service experiences are tweeted, blogged, and posted to social networks within seconds, when emotions run highest. And all of the content created in real time is distributed immediately through viral actions like posts, shares, and retweets. Moreover, new services like Aardvark allow users to pose questions via web, chat applications, twitter, or Facebook to get immediate answers from an extended network of peers. What does it mean? Your reaction to real-time reviews must be in real time too.

TAKEAWAY: By monitoring real-time conversations, brands can put out fires, leverage positive endorsements, and participate in the conversation. But that’s just scratching the surface. Brands that go beyond monitoring may find opportunities to initiate endorsements at the time of interaction by providing prompts and channels to leave feedback, thus maximizing positive word-of-mouth recommendations.

5. The objectives of online creative are shifting from consumable to sharable.

As a social online experience becomes the new norm, online display advertising follows. Whereas in the past online advertisers wanted big flashy ads that shouted messages and captured eyeballs, now advertisers want ads that inspire consumers to take action, particularly using social channels to spread brand messages to friends and followers.

TAKEAWAY: Our experience and research at SocialMedia.com has shown that the most effective ads: 1) include real people, 2) spread real messages, and 3) are adapted to the environment in which they are served.

Right now the SocialMedia.com team is chugging full-steam ahead on developing the first social-advertising platform for publishers. But to continue to make killer social ads in the future, it was important for us to reflect on what happened in social advertising in 2009 and identify the most important lessons that we learned. Here they are:

1. Trust is everything. Because social advertising brings real people and real relationships into the mix, it’s essential to preserve trust around the board. If belief in the message is removed, then the added value from social is non-existent. In the same vein, don’t pay people to say good things about you. Paying users to tweet or promote your brand reduces trust between people, and therefore reduces the value of the message.

2. Advertising through someone’s social graph is the most influential form of marketing. In our experience the most engaging social campaigns aren’t big flashy ads, rather they are bite-sized pieces of content from real people (status updates, recommendations, shared preferences). Ads that incorporate such social messages perform better than ads that don’t. Across our campaigns the social ad (word of mouth impression) has consistently higher CTR than the non-social ad (opt-in impression). Earlier in the year we partnered with a third-party research group, Dynamic Logic, to conduct the first-ever social advertising research study. The results established that social ads perform better than their non-social counterparts with regards to purchase intent, online ad awareness, and brand favorability.

3. Social isn’t always obvious. Social is easy to see when in the form of a simple social graph on a networking site such as Facebook or LinkedIn, in which the social relationships are one-to-one connections formed by users. But social goes well beyond that boundary. All publishers have some form of social graph.  However, it’s likely transparent. Individual readers on a site are not directly connected via friendship, but they do interact with one another and they all share similar interests and experiences.  These common interactions, interests, and experiences bind users and form an implicit social community.  Everyone in the community cares about what the rest of the community thinks, and therefore shared messages and media within the community carry additional meaning and influence.

4. Twitter is a broadcast medium. Harvard Business research found this year that over 90% of content on Twitter is created by only 10% of Twitter users. Advertisers should discover authentic message about their brand from the 10%, and then surface and amplify those messages to the rest of millions who are listening. Other social sites are also trending towards this play, e.g. Facebook fan pages.

5. It’s not just about the click. While social ads perform better, marketers need to look beyond CTR to user engagement activities such as share, like, recommend, tweet, and become a fan. All of these activities should be measured and weighed along with traditional marketing metrics. And, as the research showed, social ads are particularly useful for increasing purchase intent, online ad awareness, and favorability — all of these are must-have metrics for the marketer’s dashboard.

SocialMedia.com is developing the first platform for social advertising, and we need someone to make sure it looks great! We are looking to hire a multi-talented graphic and web designer who can turn out production-ready display banners and build new pages on our company website all in a single day.  Your time will be split approximately 65% on design and 35% on web development work. Therefore, we need someone with a strong background in design, typography, and branding while at the same time being able to code web pages, web forms, email templates, Wordpress themes, etc.

Candidates should take a strategic approach to projects, always looking for ways to improve ideas and to better the end result. At SocialMedia, you will have the opportunity to work on brand advertising for some of the world’s best-known companies, including Microsoft, Apple, Chevrolet, Kraft, Universal Studios, Target, Walmart, and many others!

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with the Business Development team to create polished display ads, including mock-ups for pitching and production-ready ads that will run on our network
• Help create pitches for large publishers companies by professionally packaging product collateral including ad mocks, presentations, spec sheets, etc.
• Conceptualize and build fully-functionally new product ideas for our advertising units, drawing on best practices in usability. Background in user experience design is highly preferred.
• Work with Marketing Manager to oversee the continued development and deployment of SocialMedia’s public-facing website. This includes creating original webpage designs and coding them into fully-functioning, standards-compliant pages for deployment on the web.
• Work with Marketing Manager to design and develop promotional materials, including custom-built newsletters and product guides.
• Maintain an organized collection of creative and branding assets for use by other team members.

Must-have technical skills

• Expert graphic designer with extensive experience using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator (Flash experience a major plus).
• Front-end web design and development, including mastery of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP.
• Experience with the WordPress CMS.
• Experience developing for modern browsers and degrading sites gracefully for older ones.

Qualifications

• Leadership qualities and strong communication skills
• Strong multi-tasking skills
• Attention to detail and quality a must
• Desire to work in a fast-paced environment and ability to meet deadlines

About SocialMedia.com

We are a young, fast paced company continually innovating and growing in the constantly changing world of social advertising. We are looking for great people who are aligned with our values, want to move the ball forward, and do insanely great work:

• We are a small, talented team with great camaraderie.
• Everybody has a lot of responsibility and the opportunity to make a huge difference.
• We’re totally focused on what we believe is the next big wave in web advertising, which is bringing the social element into the mix.
• We were the first ad network dedicated to social network applications, and we continue to be the first to produce key offerings in the social media advertising category.
• We are widely regarded as the leader in this space.

Our office is located on the water at Pier 38 in San Francisco, just a short walk from the 4th & King Caltrain station.  Social Media is an EOE, competitive in salary, upside, equity and benefits. We are conveniently located near public transportation

To apply please send an resume and link to portfolio to jobs@socialmedia.com.

As a result of this New York Times article, the buzz in social advertising this weekend was all about in-tweet advertisements: To cash in or not to cash in? To unfollow or continue following those who participate? The debate is nearly as heated as Team Edward vs. Team Jacob.

Social Ads Improve Users’ Advertising Experience

At SocialMedia.com we are familiar with the arguments of using social media in advertising. In fact, using real people to spread brand messages is something we’ve been thinking about for awhile. In June 2008 we first introduced social banner ads which give users the opportunity to interact with a brand and share that interaction with a friend. If the user chooses to engage with the ad, we then display that choice to their friends in the same ad.

As SocialMedia.com co-founder, Dave Gentzel, explained in 2008:

The fundamental reason people dislike advertising is because they think it takes advantage of them. This is especially true when individuals are inside ads. But, our goal is not to put people inside of ads as a gimmick, as gimmicks die and provide little value to anyone. Instead, we want to facilitate real conversation and interaction around certain products and brands.

Our approach simply and easily makes existing display advertising more relevant and more engaging — without disrupting or invading your usual online experience. This is why we are excited to be developing the first social advertising platform that helps publishers make any online ad social, anywhere on the web. Here’s one example:

Social Ads Also Perform Better

Last year SocialMedia.com conducted the first-ever social advertising research study in partnership with Dynamic Logic, establishing that social ads perform better than their non-social counterparts with regards to purchase intent, online ad awareness, and brand favorability.

…But Paying Consumers to Create the Message Breaks The Equation

So we’ve come to the conclusion that social ads are better because:

Real messages from real people = higher brand awareness, purchase intent, and favorability.

But, when adding monetization to the equation, the equation falls apart:

Paid messages from real people = confusion, distrust, and annoyance.

Here are more highlights from the debate. What do you think?

AGAINST

• Robert Scoble was quoted in the NYT article that in-tweet advertising “interferes with your relationship with your friends and your audience.” He expands on this in his blog post, arguing that “if Twitter or Facebook becomes infested with instream ads it will piss everyone off and we’ll all leave, so any investment in building audiences in those systems will be destroyed by the greed of other people.”
• Paul Carr also comicly struggles between right and wrong in his recent blog post, ultimately deciding that “Following people on Twitter is like organising the world’s largest cocktail party – we’ve decided who’s opinions we trust, and we’ve invited them to come into our homes and talk to us about things they are genuinely interested in. The moment people start screwing around with that principle, the whole system collapses.”  After wrapping us his long-winded epiphany using the cocktail party metaphor, Carr bravely declares “Give me ad-free conversation, or give me death.”

FOR

• Mark Suster (of the firm GRP Partners that funds Ad.ly - a startup that powers the monetization of in-tweet advertising) argues that in-tweet advertising is good for consumers here and here. Based on the assumption that some form of advertising must be perpetuated,  shouldn’t those who create the content (tweets) be the ones making money from it?  Moreover, in-tweet advertising still bestows users with the power of choosing who they follow and thus, who they receive in-tweet advertising from. Suster also points out that in-stream ads expands the reach of the brand message, as they would appear on third-party apps through tweets, where banner or side ads could only live on Twitter.com.

SocialMedia.com and Adknowledge announced today that SocialMedia.com’s ad network will be moving to Adknowledge, effective this Friday, November 20.  We at SocialMedia.com are excited about this transition as it will allow us to focus 100% of our time and effort into developing the first social advertising platform for publishers and advertisers, enabling them to make all online ads social, anywhere on the web.

Below are excerpts from a joint press release between SocialMedia.com and Adknowledge:

Adknowledge currently partners with more than 2,000 publishers and developers. In the past two years, the company has made four acquisitions in the social media space. Cubics, an Adknowledge company, delivers more than 700 million banner impressions daily to consumers using Facebook, MySpace, and other social networking sites. Super Rewards, another Adknowledge company, is the leading virtual currency platform. Together, they deliver over 10% of total daily page impressions on Facebook. By adding the ad network business of SocialMedia.com, Adknowledge is providing publishers with increased monetization opportunities.

“We are excited to welcome SocialMedia’s publishers to our network.  We are committed to providing them with highly competitive payouts and industry-leading, ad content management tools,” commented Dwayne Lafleur, General Manager of Social Advertising at Adknowledge. “As the only major social ad network that does not build applications that compete with developers, we can assure developers that we only have their best interests at heart,” he added.

Effective November 18, publishers will be able to access a new Cubics account from Adknowledge and can elect to replace their existing ad code. Publishers will also be able to source administrative reports and stats.

SocialMedia.com and Adknowledge will continue to work closely together in the future.  Adknowledge will continue to provide publishers with industry-leading payouts and will be running branded ads that SocialMedia.com will be selling.

The transition of SocialMedia.com’s ad network to Adknowledge will allow SocialMedia to focus solely on its core business of developing the first social advertising platform. SocialMedia.com is focused on powering the next generation of social ads across the web through this platform. SocialMedia.com has been a pioneer in social advertising since 2007, building a Facebook ad platform that has allowed app developers to manage, market, and monetize their inventory. Moving forward, the company is going to bring this level of holistic publisher service beyond Facebook app developers, allowing web publishers to socially enable their inventory across the web.

Information for SocialMedia.com Developers:

• SocialMedia.com will continue to serve ads and record activity in your Social Media account until Friday, November 20, noon (PST). Please direct questions to adsupport@socialmedia.com
• On Friday your inventory will be directed to Adknowledge. Adknowledge has already set up accounts for you that can be accessed at cubics.com. You will receive an email with your login information.