Are advertisers warming up to social media? According to Nielsen, it seems like the ice indeed is starting to thaw. A new study suggests that consumer time spent on blogs and social networks account for 17 percent of all time on the Web. And advertisers are paying attention: Nielsen believes ad spending on social platforms and blogs grew a whopping 119 percent to $108 million as of last month. Entertainment companies lead the pack with an increase in ad spending by 812 percent. It goes to show that as the space matures, advertisers are getting more comfortable - a good thing, considering that consumers don't appear to be ditching social platforms anytime soon.

The hype around community platforms (i.e. social networks) is huge, so it's always interesting when a study comes along that says consumers spend more time engaging with plain old content than immersed in the latest social craze. But that is indeed the case, at least according to the OPA.

According to the report, while Facebook has stolen users away from email and instant messaging, it hasn't taken people away from the content sites they love. Time on content sites has surged by 88 percent since 2003, going from three hours and forty two minutes to nearly seven hours, on average. When it comes to user behavior online, content, it seems, is still king.

360i's David Berkowitz always has something interesting to say, and his recent MediaPost column is no exception. In it, he discusses the concept of social graph targeting – the ability to target consumers based on associations with each other, presumably within social networks – as a next gen targeting mechanism.

Certainly the ability to understand the expressed desires of a consumer, then gain visibility into his or her relationship network, is powerful stuff. But a couple questions spring to mind:

-On social nets, how are the two (relationships + common interests) consistently connected? I friend people for a variety of reasons – friends, co-workers, college buddies, and now, weirdly enough, parents – yet us sharing hobbies or a taste in movies is not a necessary criteria, or even factor in our relationship.
-How is the context of a user’s relationship in a social network environment determined? Is it reliant on user input (for example I explicitly state I am someone’s friend/co-worker/cousin?)
-Do we have any more insight into a user's frame of mind when in a social net environment? Data from last year indicated soc nets users were less receptive to ads and made fewer purchases as a result. Does new data tell a different story? How does this info help shape expectations around what soc nets can and can't do from a marketing perspective?

The deliberate connections web users create with one another are significant, but understanding the commonalities that bind them makes it so much more meaningful. Am I connected to you because you give great advice on introducing baby to solid foods? Or because you’re a relative of mine? Different scenarios have vastly different marketing implications. The idea of peer-to-peer connections isn't unique to social networks of course. Increasingly, web content is becoming socially-charged, allowing marketers to see how relationships are formed around topical content -- i.e. which sites link together around the movie Bruno -- which can help make targeting even more powerful.

I recently returned from maternity leave, and have been slowly reintegrating myself back into the real world (rather, the real digital media world ) these past few weeks. When I took leave in February, the tone in the industry was pretty dismal – headlines were peppered with bleak analyst outlooks, lay-offs, shrinking marketing budgets.

While we haven't done a complete 180, there is a different feeling in the air today vs. 6 months ago. One obvious change is a renewed sense of optimism around brand advertising online. In Q1 of this year, the business of online branding took a huge beating in the press: report after report said the recession would force advertisers to funnel the lion's share of ad budget into search and other direct response programs so they could better track how precious dollars were spent. Numerous headlines posed questions like “whither display?” talking up the banner ad’s “imminent death.” The recession underscored what everyone already knew – clicks aren’t the best tool to help brand advertisers realize success online – but, in the wake of the economic squeeze, it was easy to get carried away.

Now it seems the tide has turned – or perhaps the discussion became a little more realistic. Last month, comScore and the Online Publishers Association (OPA) released a study to remind marketers of the value branded display brings: display makes search work better – more than 50% lift in web surfers conducting a query after exposure to a display ad; display improves user engagement on advertiser sites; and, the kicker, branded ad campaigns actually influence web users to spend more money. On the heels of that study, Microsoft Advertising partnered with comScore to release a new offering designed to convince brand advertisers to move more dollars online by providing reach and frequency data at the ad placement level. And there is no shortage of upstart companies trying to tackle the issue of online brand metrics – from persistent ad formats to new metrics like time spent, it feels like we’re inching closer every day to making the web a more hospitable place for brands. This is something BuzzLogic is focused heavily on as well – helping brands use conversational media to influence a user’s consideration set as they work their way down the purchase funnel. It’s good to be back, and to know we’re in good company as we help brand advertisers discover a better way to reach audiences online and, in the process, move more dollars there too.

Change is sweeping the marketing industry; all digital media is becoming conversational in nature, which means existing media buying and selling strategies need to be modified and new ones need to be built.

We’ve got some changes happening here at BuzzLogic too. The rise of conversational media has enabled a new kind of engagement opportunity for brands – one that centers around cultivating relationships with content providers and offering them something of value for their audiences. Essentially, we’re starting to see the traditional PR role converging with a traditional advertiser role. Where things will get really exciting is how exactly these two points will intersect – and how advertisers will start launching integrated programs (combining both paid media and "earned media," or WOM) to maximize awareness.

At BuzzLogic, we find this intersection is particularly fascinating. We’ve spent the last two years building out a media offering that allows advertisers to target campaigns around conversations publishers have with each other on specific topics. Now, as advertisers are getting closer to fully understanding how to tap the Web as a branding vehicle, our focus is about helping those brands better understand the audiences conversational media attracts – and how to leverage conversational content to fuel a brand's marketing strategy.

Given the market opportunity and how our business has grown within the advertising community, we have decided to no longer offer our subscription monitoring software as a stand-alone product. No, our social analysis IP is not going away; instead, our technology advancements will focus on "Insights" as a means for new, data-driven advertiser planning, targeting, reporting and measurement tools, the first of which, our Conversational Ad Dashboard, we recently launched last month.

The future of online advertising remains a bright one; despite a tough economy, there is still huge opportunity:
1) The online display ad market is still forecast for growth $7.8B in 2009, $8.3B in 2010 (Forrester 7/09 advertising forecast).
2) Despite the worst economic recession in 70 years, spending on WOM spending word-of-mouth marketing rose 14.2% to $1.54 billion in 2008 (PQ Media).
3) Recent figures from Pubmatic indicate that ad prices are on the rise as more networks incorporate new targeting technology and premium content – two elements that have been baked into BuzzLogic’s advertiser value proposition from the start.

Our ability to surface and organize online conversations, and guide ad placements across them, has helped advertisers reach their audiences in ever more meaningful ways. The recent launch of our Conversational Ad Dashboard helps power this by offering advertisers visibility into the conversations happening on the sites they buy media on, as well as presenting new conversational metrics for success.

Over the course of the last year, we’ve spent a lot of time with the folks at the IAB helping to define new Social Media Metrics for conversational media. Things like Conversation Size – the number of sites referencing a topic – or Conversation Density – the amount of content within sites focused on certain topics – represent new ways for advertisers to better understand the conversational landscape, and better direct their selection of media partners.

We’re excited about the direction conversational media is headed and the role our technology can play in helping brands capitalize on it. Stay tuned for more changes to come, as BuzzLogic unveils a new Web site in the coming weeks to more strongly reinforce our company's direction.

Our team at BuzzLogic has been hard at work, with what we believe is a very exciting development designed to help propel conversational marketing and advertising forward - our new Conversational Advertising Dashboard. We owe a great deal to our agency and brand customers for helping guide our thinking (thank you!). Hands down they told us they wanted a clear visual and metrics driven understanding of conversations taking place in blogs and other social publishing platforms, deeper understanding of how advertising performs within specific conversations to help guide their creative and planning processes, and the transparency and control to get comfortable with the sites and content where their ads appear. Today, we're announcing these capabilities for our advertisers.

More and more, we're seeing incredible work in the agency world bringing together Search, Display and Digital WOM. We're big believers in the power of synergy between the three, and excited to play a role in helping pull them together.

We still plan to go further... The technology was designed blog platform independent and ad network independent, and we hope to make it available to the other network and publishing companies who are also working hard to advance our segment of the digital media industry. We're doing our best to simplify the media buying process in conversational media, and we look forward to sharing that capability.

The Conversational Advertising Dashboard was a huge undertaking to develop, I'm very proud of our team for achieving this level of accomplishment.

Rob Crumpler
CEO

Today is both an exciting and daunting time to be an online marketer – with so many ways to reach audiences, so many mediums in which to do so and so many ways to track success.

Nowhere was that theme more apparent than on my recent trip to the IAB’s Social Media Marketplace event, where the industry attempted to shed some light into the otherwise murky waters of social media and advertising. The event led with the release of two documents outlining Social Media Metrics Definitions and Best Practices. Everyone agreed, these documents are just a start and even while we may never have true industry-wide adoption as innovation seems to outpace us, they do provide a roadmap for the common practitioner.

Some messages that came across loud and clear:

• The Power of Content, which was brought up both by Josh Bernoff and John Batelle – more and more consumers are trusting content created by their peers over other sources. Search results no longer hold the power they once did as readers choose consumer generated results more than company sponsored links.
  
• Traditional advertising metrics and business KPIs aren’t going away anytime soon and while advertisers and marketers struggle to catch up with the new mediums and measurements possible to track performance, (and the newly released iab document does help)...marketers need to be able to tie campaign objectives (especially in a social world )back to real world business KPIs. Was there a trackable shift in consumer attitude? What were the post click actions that are attributable to building brand affinity or product sales?

Content is now social and audiences are having conversations with each-other about brands. As marketers, we need to determine how to leverage these opportunities to reach our audiences. One way is to tap the content rich conversations present in the blogopshere. For my panel: Dealing With Data Overload: Developing Your Social Media Scorecard, I laid out a measurement framework that would take marketers through every stage of planning and executing their campaigns. A detailed walk-through of the framework is laid out here.

Josh Bernoff noted that “people don’t want to talk about products, they want to talk about their passions or their problems and solutions” validating the fact that in conversational marketing, a different approach is needed both in creative execution as well as in targeting.

We have seen performance of several campaigns at BuzzLogic that points to different affinity levels within different categories such as technology and entertainment. One technology focused campaign saw a sizeable lift in performance (CTR) when ads were targeted at conversations about competitors over their brand conversations. Industry conversations also performed better – perhaps highlighting the fact that technology buyers were already aware of the brand. And a desire to learn when engaged in conversations about the industry or competitors, a learning that can certainly help to guide creative development further upstream and create messages that resonate with audiences in the right way.

In the Entertainment category , we saw the opposite affect where brand conversations were the best performers and ads resonated more with audiences familiar with and engaging in conversations about the company – signaling not only different levels of affinity within different categories but also providing opportunities for engagement with an audience more apt to respond to your messages.

Where does that leave us? Somewhere in need of a bridge from yesterday to tomorrow – applying the traditional reach, frequency and demographic metrics we are familiar with yet coming to them perhaps in a different way by adapting to the conversation.

Seeing where audiences are congregating, in addition to the traditional reach and demographic approach, can open up new insights. To use a simple analogy, take a look at the hive where the honey is located, and not just at the bee who may or may not be seeking your brand of honey. In looking at the hive you may uncover new findings about your audience – new bees, behaviors, and conversations that can make you a smarter marketer. Then overlapping reach and demographics back to those conversations to effectively align your media plan.

When approaching the campaign lifecycle where a component of the media plan calls for social media, specifically blogs, BuzzLogic recommends using the following framework as a guideline for measurement considerations:

The first step to consider in this proposed framework is media plan creation and campaign targeting. In addition to considering traditional reach and demographic metrics in the planning process, why not also consider the topic of conversations around which audiences are congregating? By looking at the conversation first, you surface ad inventory that will resonate with enthusiastic audiences. These current and/or potential customers are already engaged in the discussion related to your campaign objectives. You can then use a traditional measurement service such as Comscore or Quantcast to overlay reach and demographic metrics that your business teams have been using since the inception of the interactive space in the early 1990s.

The second step in the framework is campaign execution. As you or your agency starts to track how campaigns are doing, measuring campaign performance by conversation can unlock new insights. Just like with traditional site or ad size optimization, move more impressions towards conversations that are performing, then revisit your conversation definition, creative and/or site selection for conversations that are under performing.

The final step in the framework, which should also be considered the first iteration of the media planning for the next campaign, is post-campaign analysis and learning. Social media is about iteration, and iteration implies multiple campaigns over time. The frequency component of the “reach and frequency” mantra, is even more paramount in social media. In addition to looking at the traditional performance metrics, e.g. impressions, clicks and CTR, at the campaign level and by conversation, marketers should then correlate those metrics to the language business stakeholders understand, e.g. business KPIs? Was this a branding campaign – what was the share of conversation impact over multiple campaigns or what was the lift in the brand affinity through statistical studies in target geographies? Was this a direct response campaign – what was the lift in catalog assortment or specific SKUs sales over the several campaigns? How were my site’s web metrics impacted as a result of these campaigns? Did I see a spike in a user registrations or requests for my company’s whitepapers as a result of the campaign?

Not every marketer’s framework will be the same but by breaking out the creative cycle out into Pre / During / Post and identifying metrics at the get-go – marketers can ensure they are continuously improving upon their campaigns and ultimately meeting the key business objectives.

Summer is on its way and with the new season, comes the summer action flicks. This month, we looked at the films bringing the most buzz among the influencers looking at conversations between May 1 and May 26. For a full recap see the PR week column (Note: subscription required)

Memorial Day brought lots movie buzz around Star Trek, Terminator Salvation and X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Interesting to note that top conversations around these films focused not on the movies themselves, but on their marketing and advertising promotions. For Star Trek, the top post was about the mini-site Nokia created to highlight its product placements in the movie. The most influential post on Wolverine from GoNintendo, actually focused on the Wolverine video game.

Also in the spotlight, the comedy film Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian which had one-third of the influencers discussing the performance of Amy Adams as pilot Amelia Earhart. Perhaps even more interesting, the fact that Washington DC-based sites like the Washington Examiner are emerging as influential for this movie, as the setting and film premiere take place in the city's most prominent museum.

Listening to the conversations taking place about these movies surfaced some surprising new conversation themes, such as buzz behind the movie promotions themselves as well as the cities where the movies are based. Diving into the meat of the conversation in this way can create new targeting opportunities. For example, consider also using local angles to reach your audiences, or taking a look at peripheral topics such games and promotions your audience may be discussing. Understanding how consumers are engaged in the dialogue can directly impact your advertising execution and help you create more focused messages that speak directly to your audiences.

Jason Calcanis’ recent Mediapost column from the halls of OMMA Global hit a chord. While he’s right on the mark about user intent on social nets vs. search – there are many vehicles in the social media stratus that lie in between the “dinner party / social network ” and “research / search” associations he highlights.

Type a query into a search box and its fair to say, that as a consumer, you are at some stage of the purchase funnel, whether that’s initial product discovery, researching options or actually making a final purchase. As Jason says “search works” but it works precisely because it captures intent and capitalizes on it by driving users to points of purchase.... otherwise known as the last mile or the bottom of the funnel.

But what is lost in Jason’s analogy is the time the consumer spent on content or the brand impressions seen by the consumer as they engaged with that content, and which ultimately contributed to that final decision. It’s the critical middle phases of the funnel, in which consumers are getting answers and refining their choices all while going to the experts (aka publishers) they know, that will help them get to the final decision.

Our research with Jupiter shows that consumers depend on blogs at critical stages in the purchase funnel with 59 percent using a blog to refine and get answers related to their purchase and 54 percent using information gleaned to decide and execute that buy.

And while, Twitter does offer a new way to reach broad audiences ala Jason’s Superbowl commercial analogy, it isn’t necessarily capturing audience intent or precisely targeting the right audience, at least not yet.

Two factors make advertising (and specifically display advertising) in blogs a unique and valuable part of any marketer’s ad mix:

1) The dialogue that bloggers are able to have with their audiences is one that is both unique and personal in nature, thus making blogs highly influential and trusted by their readers.

2) Display ads heavily and positively impact other online campaigns, such as search. In fact, the majority of search queries occur on branded keyword terms – studies have shown that after seeing a display ad, consumers are 54% more likely to search on an advertisers’ brand keyword- proving that display advertising, not only impacts other consumer behavior, it can actually push consumers further down the purchase funnel to the last mile.

Combine those two factors and you have an effective way to reach audiences gathering around their trusted authors' content and more likely to be impacted by brands they see.

If social networks are the dinner parties, and search is the cash register, then perhaps blogs are the farmers markets inspiring the recipes.

Food for thought. (sorry couldn't resist)