CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – With Facebook’s initial public offering last week, the social networking giant can look ahead to a potentially huge new source of revenue from “social advertising,” according to new research by MIT Sloan School of Management Associate Professor of Marketing Catherine Tucker. Tucker says that Facebook itself is only beginning to recognize the “untapped potential” of this kind of advertising fueled by its own technology.

Tucker’s research counters the prevailing view of recent years that social network websites are unfruitful venues for paid advertising. Instead, she finds that social advertising has been under-valued and underrated as a revenue stream and as an effective way to deliver messages, though only if those messages are delivered the right way.

“Facebook has only recently figured out what is unique about all the data they collect,” says Tucker. “Facebook knows who peoples’ friends are, which can be hugely valuable to marketers. Feeding that social network into the Facebook algorithm creates huge and under-exploited profit potential.”

In social advertising, marketers use online social relationships to target and improve their ads. For her new research paper, Tucker examined data from an experiment in which a nonprofit charity used both traditional and social advertising on Facebook. Tucker found that the social ads, which were targeted to friends of `fans’ of the nonprofit on Facebook, attracted far more clicks than those that were not. “When you target ads based on who is friends with whom, you can double the number of click,” she says. “This is because advertisers can uncover consumers who could also get excited about their product.”

“Social advertising is not necessarily replacing display advertising,” adds Tucker. “Rather, it is a different and more effective form of targeted advertising that still remains unrefined, even on Facebook.” So far, Facebook’s algorithm appears to treat all Facebook friends equally, Tucker explains. “But among your friends, certain people have more influence; they are the `gatekeepers’ whom you tend to follow more closely. When Facebook refines its algorithm to incorporate such gatekeepers as part of social advertising, we will see ever greater improvements in advertising response.”

But Facebook must be careful about how it uses such powerful information, Tucker cautions. “There is a level of intrusiveness that no advertiser should cross. Advertisers must avoid being overt in their attempts to exploit social networks in their advertising. If Facebook too explicitly takes advantage of your friend, it could cross that line.” For example, in her study she finds that an ad that states explicitly, “Be like your friend” deters users, who could resent that Facebook or any other company is openly commercializing friendship. But if the consumer is simply informed that “Susan likes this,” it is not seen as a personal intrusion. “Speculatively, the results suggest that intrusive or highly personal advertising is more acceptable if done algorithmically by a faceless entity such as a computer than when it is the result of evident human agency,” Tucker writes.

These are the kinds of issues with which Facebook itself is grappling as it gets more deeply into social advertising. “Facebook is not giving much guidance to advertisers about how to use this new technology, partly because it is so new. But the results of my research suggest that social networks will be able to exploit their unique data on who is friends with whom to enlarge their share of advertising dollars.”

While 30% of users between ages 18 and 24 like Timeline, only 10% of those over 65 were happy with the new design. When broken down by gender, men and women had exactly the same opinion – 77% dislike Timeline, while 23% like it.

Full poll results can be seen at: http://www.sodahead.com/united-states/public-opinion-rejects-facebook-timeline-infographic/question-2429779/

About SodaHead
SodaHead (www.SodaHead.com) is the premier opinion-based discussion community where visitors discover, debate, and discuss today’s hottest issues.  Millions of SodaHeads share their unique views on hot topics, breaking news, and controversial issues and a diverse panel of staff writers provide original and exclusive content daily.  Users create personal profiles and engage with fellow members around shared interests.  Our site offers a wide variety of interactive features including slide shows, profile creation, groups, message boards, and original content.  SodaHead is also the best in class poll widget provider powering the polls for ABC News, Good Morning America, Shepard Smith at Fox News and many others. For more information on SodaHead, visit http://www.SodaHead.com

São Paulo, Brazil – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released data showing that Facebook assumed the top position in the Brazilian social networking market following a year of exceptional growth. In December 2011, Facebook.com attracted 36.1 million visitors – representing an increase of 192 percent in the past twelve months – to surpass Orkut as the leading social networking destination in the market.

“Facebook’s rapid ascent in the Brazilian market has certainly been one of the most interesting stories to develop during the course of 2011,” said Alex Banks, comScore managing director for Brazil. “Brazil has always been a particularly social market and currently owns the fifth largest social networking population in the world. But despite the cultural affinity for social media, Facebook adoption had traditionally lagged in the market. That has all changed in the past year, during which the site has tripled in audience size as engagement has grown sevenfold to assume the leadership position in the market.”

Facebook.com, Orkut and Windows Live Profile Lead Social Networking Rankings

Results from the recent comScore study It’s a Social World revealed that Brazil was one of just seven markets (including China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Poland and Russia) where Facebook did not lead the local social networking category according to October 2011 data.

In December 2011, however, Facebook.com finally secured the top position in Brazil’s social networking ranking with 36.1 million visitors age 6 and older accessing the site from a home or work computer, nearly tripling in audience size in the past year. Orkut, which fell to the #2 position with 34.4 million visitors, still managed to grow its audience 5 percent in the past year despite Facebook’s growing prominence. Windows Live Profile ranked third with 13.3 million visitors (up 13 percent), while Twitter.com ranked fourth with 12.5 million visitors (up 40 percent).

Vostu.com and Tumblr.com both achieved triple-digit audience increases with Vostu.com growing 338 percent to 4.9 million visitors and Tumblr.com growing 206 percent to 4 million visitors. New to the scene in 2011, Google Plus attracted 4.3 million visitors during December 2011, with Brazil ranking as one of the top global markets for the social network by audience size. The combined unduplicated audience of Google Plus and Orkut was 34.9 million visitors, still trailing Facebook.

*Excludes visitation from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs

Facebook.com Visitors Average Nearly 5 Hours on the Site in December

Facebook.com saw impressive growth across all major metrics during the past year, including significant increases in audience engagement. In December 2011, an average visitor to Facebook.com spent 4.8 hours on the site, surging from just 37 minutes in December 2010. Visitors consumed an average of 500 pages of content on the site during December (up 655 percent), and visited the site an average of 27 times during the month (up nearly 163 percent).

*Excludes visitation from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs

Profile of a Facebook.com Visitor in Brazil

A closer look at visitors to Facebook.com revealed that females averaged more time on the site at 5.3 hours compared to 4.1 hours for males, mirroring a broader global dynamic of females’ heavier social networking engagement. People between the ages of 25-34 accounted for the largest share of visitors to Facebook.com at 30.6 percent of the total audience, while visitors age 15-24 averaged the most time on the site at 6.2 hours per visitor in December.

Geographically, visitors from Rio de Janeiro and Distrito Federal displayed the highest levels of engagement with the site averaging 5.1 hours on the site during the month. Visitors from São Paulo accounted for more than one-third of all Facebook.com visitors.

Mr. Banks continued, “We saw Facebook’s audience surpass that of Orkut in Brazil’s Southeast region before the site became the category leader for the entire country. While the Southeast was undoubtedly the region where Facebook’s ascension to the top of the category began, we have seen that now only half of Facebook’s Brazilian page views come from this region compared to more than 75 percent a year ago, demonstrating the widespread adoption of the site throughout the country.”

*Excludes visitation from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs

About comScore

comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world and preferred source of digital business analytics. For more information, please visit www.comscore.com/companyinfo.

San Mateo, Calif – BrightEdge, the leading site, search and social management platform for global enterprises, today released analysis showing that Google+ page creation amongst the world’s top 100 brands jumped in the last month from 61 percent to 77 percent (93 percent of top 100 brands are on Facebook), while the number of people in circles increased over 50 percent from 147k to 222k.

It is still early days as top 100 brands determine how best to establish a Google+ presence, while continuing to attract more people in circles.  Google continues to have the largest fan contingent of any brand with more than 77k fans, up from 65k just one month before.  Brands like Starbucks nearly quadrupled their social followers in the last month and H&M and Pepsi broke into 20k plus people in circles, which is still a shadow of the millions of Facebook fans these brands have already connected with. In fact, a review of Facebook and Google+ properties for all top 100 brands, showed a collective total of almost 300 million Facebook fans for these top brands, compared to approximately 148k Google+ followers for these same brands.

“Google is embedding their popular new product with its dominant search marketing position, replicating the tie between social and search channels, just as Facebook’s Open Graph tied sites and search together earlier this year, blurring the lines between social and search engagement,” said Jim Yu, CEO of BrightEdge. “Top 100 brands are realizing that they now need to address both channels. Now the real work begins, if they want to extend their social presence on the Web from Facebook to the new Google+.”

To learn more about the Google+ analysis, please visit BrightEdge SocialShare to view and download the full report here: http://www.brightedge.com/resources.

About BrightEdge
BrightEdge is the leading site, search and social management solution for global enterprises, helping more than 1,100 of the world’s largest brands stay ahead in the rapidly evolving Internet landscape.
BrightEdge S3 drives more than $4 billion in organic search across industries, harnessing the power of analytics to drive revenue from web sites, search engines and social networks across the globe in a measurable, predictable way. BrightEdge is based in San Mateo, CA and is privately held with financing from Battery Ventures, Altos Ventures and Illuminate Ventures.

For more information, please visit www.brightedge.com, friend us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/seoplatform or follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/brightedge.

San Francisco – Amplify Social, a San Francisco-based digital technology company, today announces the launch of The Virtual Fan Network a rich media content network that empowers brands to work directly with athletes to engage with their fan-base in short term, CPM-based, media campaigns. Amplify Social launches with exclusive contracts for over 300 active athletes in major sports including MLB’s Tim Lincecum, the NFL’s Marcedes Lewis, Mike Wallace, Michael Turner, and NFL legend Brett Favre.  Additional athletes include Shannon Boxx, of the Women’s US Olympic Soccer Team, and Freestyle Skiers Simon Dumont and Sarah Burke, with many more being signed daily.

The Virtual Fan Network allows brands to work with the biggest names in sports within the digital environment with a lower barrier for entry.  Brands can quickly and cost efficiently integrate their message into an athlete’s social media presence – and through an aggressively amplified presence of a syndicated, highly interactive, rich media network – to reach a highly targeted audience.  In a successful Virtual Fan Network beta campaign, Victory Chevrolet created a marketing presence around San Francisco Giants pitcher, Tim Lincecum.  Tim’s VFN launched with a Digital Baseball Card (http://www.facebook.com/TimLincecum) shared through his social graph and via QR code printed on a series of memorabilia drink cups to celebrate 1,000 strike-outs for the young pitcher.

“There have been limited attempts to provide athletes and the sports industry with a set of tools or a platform that allows them to properly leverage digital media,” says Amplify Social Co-Founder and CEO Brian Wilhite.  “The attempts we’ve seen are not innovative in terms of providing something new, they are simply making old models slightly more updated.  We want to provide a scalable solution that brands want to use, and that will help them reach their consumers while also providing real value for the athletes.”

“Our model allows athletes and fans to engage remotely, wherever they may be in digital media, and brands benefit from that integration,” says Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer, Cory Treffiletti.  “Brands win with a solution that integrates them into the passion of sports, while driving high levels of engagement with consumers and fans.  Fans win because they are able to connect with their favorite athletes across any number of sports.  Athletes get more of a local, national and international digital marketing presence and a new source of revenue from the world market.  Everybody wins!”

The market for digital media and the market for sports marketing and endorsements are both increasing; with digital media expected to eclipse $77 billion, exceeding TV ad spending, by 2016, according to a recent Forrester study.   Athlete sponsorship dollars are continuing to increase as well, projected to be more than $38 billion, according to eMarketer, by 2016, but this does not take into account the percentage of total ad spending that is dedicated to promoting sports marketing relationships.

“The business opportunity to marry together digital media with sports is potentially a multi-billion dollar endeavor, and an area that has seen little to no innovation to date,” adds Mr. Treffiletti.

The Virtual Fan Network is currently increasing its athlete base, with a number of brand campaigns scheduled to launch within weeks.

Amplify Social (www.amplify-social.com) is a San Francisco-based digital technology company specializing in providing social amplification solutions for brands through sports marketing.  Founded in 2011, their first product is The Virtual Fan Network, which already boasts access to over 300+ athletes and a monthly reach of over 10 million unique users through established inventory partnerships.

RED BANK, N.J. – PeopleString Corporation (OTCBB: PLPE)  announced that it has launched a Cost Per Share “CPS” social media advertising platform at PeopleDeals.com. CPS only charges advertisers when their offer is shared with their friends through social media such as Facebook, Twitter or SMS. The platform builds on the company’s patent pending “Share It Up” technology that allows advertisers to create and launch deals that go up in value the more they are shared and charged only when the deal is “shared up” in value.

The CPS platform allows social media advertisers to create an incentive for people to share their deals while allowing them to only pay when social amplification occurs. Advertisers can control how often and where a deal can be shared to reach its max value. The Cost Per Share ad network allows advertisers to leverage their existing social fan bases to reach new customers and brand awareness.

“We are very excited for our new Cost Per Share Ad network, which we believe to be one of the first of its kind for social deals. It’s kind of like Groupon meets Google,” stated Darin Myman, CEO of PeopleString. “We believe that the social endorsement technology of “Share It Up” combined with the CPS model lowers the barrier to entry and risk of social media marketing.”

About PeopleString

PeopleString Corporation (OTCBB: PLPE) creates technologies that empower consumers to leverage their social networks to capitalize on the best national and local deals. PeopleString’s patent pending “shareItUp” technology harnesses the power of social media to create coupons that go up in value when shared and rewards loyal customers who share their favorite merchants with others. PeopleString also offers patent pending “Insta Portal” technology which allows users to import pieces of their favorite websites into their own PeopleString homepage. For more information, visit www.peoplestring.com and www.peopledeals.com.

Clients of the display advertising platform Adform http://www.adform.com are now able to obtain optimum results from their Facebook campaigns by working exclusively with Alchemy Social; a well-known application owned by Experian, the global information services company http://alchemysocial.com/

The integration of Alchemy Social with Adform’s online platform means it is now possible to create and update the contents of banner ads and retrieve financial campaign data about Facebook campaigns. With this new offering, Adform becomes the world’s most complete cloud-based platform for managing, buying, measuring and optimising online campaigns within all display advertising including rich media.

“We are really happy with our partnership with Alchemy Social, which offers our customers a efficient way to compare all online display advertising,” declares Martin Stockfleth Larsen, director of marketing and new business at Adform. “The API integration is effective and serves up complete reports. Thus there is a time-saving element involved in exploiting the possibility, and the setup is more user-friendly than in Facebook’s own interface,”

“The Alchemy Social team is delighted to be working in partnership with Adform across major European markets. The rapid growth of Facebook advertising is fundamental to the display market as a whole and, as such, customers will benefit hugely from Adform’s integration of Alchemy within its existing offering. Alchemy’s partnership with Adform allows customers to manage Facebook campaigns as the separate entity that they are, whilst providing the ability to view them alongside other online activity,”explains Will Ashton, managing director of Alchemy Social.

By using Alchemy Social, an approximate 80 per cent higher click through rate (CTR) has been documented and a 50 per cent lower charge per click (CPC) than the average Facebook ad. Alchemy Social was the first application to optimise Facebook Ads’ though ads API and is now an optional product for Adform’s online platform of the same name.

About Adform
Adform close the loop by integrating media planning, buying, optimising, and reporting for all online display advertising in one place, thus saving an enormous amount of time, money and resources.

Adform’s unique platform incorporates display ad serving, rich media, video, mobile, dynamic ads, personalised targeting, and real-time bidding though integrations with major inventory players, making display advertising simple, relevant and rewarding for media agencies and online advertisers. Adform was established in Denmark in 2002 and now has offices in nine countries including UK, Germany and Italy. Visit http://www.adform.com or http://www.twitter.com/adforminsider for more information.

About Techlightenment
Techlightenment, an Experian Company, was founded in 2007 by Arjuna Gihan Fernando and Ankur Shah. Techlightenment develops technology to power social media advertising campaigns for multinational businesses and global advertising agencies. The company uses a data-driven approach to create, implement and track highly targeted online campaigns that effectively identify and reach key audiences. Customers include GlaxoSmithKline, Universal Pictures, Dr. Martens.
Techlightenment is a Facebook Preferred Developer Consultant and Advertising API Beta participant, and the only MySpace European Development partner.

For more information, visit www.techlightenment.com

Following a chat with Shane Keats, Director of Product Marketing at DataXu, we found out more about the DX Social platform and what it brings to advertisers and buying desks.

DX Social was born out of the pressing need to add a social component to DataXu’s high speed data trading platform. For the time being, the social component ties into the Facebook Ads API, where vast audiences are to be found. Keats suggested DX Social may be looking into adding more social networks / platforms in the future, but for the time being the focus remains on leveraging the power of the Facebook platform.

But what exactly does DX Social do?

In a nutshell, it allows media buyers to translate audience data gathered through display advertising on non-social web properties into Facebook highly targeted audiences. The process involves, of course, the Facebook API, as well as DataXu’s own audience analytics and filtering algorithms.

The DX Social advantages?

We believe this platform to be very powerful if used to its full potential:

- the cookie-free DX Social has the RTB benefits without the troubles usually associated with cookie-dependent solutions, thus avoiding many of their privacy pitfalls;

- superior ad optimization applied to social media campaigns, that would otherwise not be possible by advertising solely on Facebook, since Facebook does not let advertisers see and take action at impression level;

- social retargeting, a concept that has been so far elusive to say the least, but made possible through DX Social’s audience building capability, where a media buyer can opt to re-message only the most socially engaged sub-set of an existing audience;

- social media engagement through display media, achieved by replicating audience engagement data from social media into display campaigns, and targeting only those who are most likely to engage with the brand.

Advertisers who already tried DX Social reported excellent results, including 3-digits percentage lift in “likes” of their Facebook page achieved in only several days, while maintaining the “like” stickiness (no unlikes) ¹.

The DataXu DX Social platform appears to be very much in line with the general trend of moving away from the ad networks model to that of RTB ad exchanges, a trend that was started by the increasing need for transparency on the buy side. In its current form, DX Social seems to have retained the key advantages of both networks and exchanges, particularly the level of transparency required to eliminate the arbitrage usually associated with ad networks.

Currently, DX Social is open to US and European advertisers only, though Shane Keats assured us that the platform will open up globally quite soon. The company, DataXu, has recently opened their London office where the landing team is led by ex-Yahoo agency group head Martin Brown ².

About DataXu
Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, DataXu provides the only cross-channel Demand Side Platform for online, mobile, social and video advertisers. Impression level decisioning and actionable analytics increase digital campaign performance, improves operational efficiencies and delivers unique consumer insights to advertisers. DataXu’s executive team unites leading executives in digital media with MIT technologists. The private company is backed by Atlas Venture, Flybridge Capital Partners and Menlo Ventures. For more information, visit www.dataxu.com or follow them on Twitter at @dataxu.

New York, NY – MediaBrix, the leading social media advertising platform offering the most powerful way to simplify and optimize brand advertising across the social web, today announced that Bob Carrigan, CEO of IDG Communications worldwide, IDG’s media and events subsidiary, has joined MediaBrix’s Broad of Directors. He joins existing Board members Joe Apprendi and Charlie Kemper both Partners at Revel Partners, investors in MediaBrix, and MediaBrix CEO Ari Brandt.

“Since Ari was named Chief Executive Officer in May, MediaBrix has gained significant traction simplifying the creation, buying, optimization and measurement of social media advertising,” says Mr. Carrigan. “I am very pleased to be on the Board and help the company fully realize the very bright future I see for it.”

Mr. Carrigan oversees IDG’s media operations, including online, print, and events in 90 countries around the world. Prior to assuming his worldwide CEO role in 2008, he was responsible for business units in the U.S., including CIO and CSO, Computerworld, InfoWorld, Macworld, Network World, PCWorld, GamePro, and IDG World Expo.  In 2009, Mr. Carrigan was named the CEO Innovator for large business publishers by Media Business and has been recognized in the annual Media Business list of “Who’s Who.” He is also a member of the Media Industry Newsletter Digital Hall of Fame and MIN Sales Hall of Fame. Mr. Carrigan is the current Chairman of the IAB.

Mr. Apprendi is the Founder & CEO of Collective, a leading media and technology solutions provider for display advertising, delivering targeted audiences to advertising agencies, brand advertisers and publishers. He also held high level management positions with K2 Digital, CLIQNOW! Sales Group, 24/7 Media, Eyeblaster, Klipmart, and Falk eSolutions.

Before helping launch Revel Partners, an early-expansion stage investment group focused on financing disruptive innovation in the areas of digital media & internet technology in February 2011, Mr. Kemper was a Principal with Steelpoint Capital Partners, a media & technology growth equity firm he joined in 2005. While at Steelpoint, he led or participated in numerous successful investments in the media & communications fields including AdSpace Networks, Atempo, Boingo Wirless (IPO), Jitterbug, SeaMobile, WMI Media Solutions, and WorkShare. Previously, Mr. Kemper worked with Darby Overseas Investments, a global private equity firm. Mr. Kemper is also a Founding Officer & Chair of the New York City Venture Connection.

“This is a top flight Board, with experience in every facet of management, finance, sales and operations of digital companies,” says Mr. Brandt. “Having Bob Carrigan on the team is the icing on the cake.”

MediaBrix (www.mediabrix.com) simplifies the creation, buying, optimization and measurement of social media advertising. It provides agencies and advertisers a single solution for all of their social advertising objectives to an audience of over 500 million both online and via mobile devices. MediaBrix’s effective and comprehensive suite of social media advertising products enables marketers to deploy, monitor and optimize social display and video advertising across social apps and provides a one-stop shop for brands to fully capitalize on social apps, games and professional video in many social network environments including Facebook and YouTube.  MediaBrix is based in New York and backed by funding from Revel Partners, an early-expansion stage investment group focused on financing disruptive innovation in the areas of digital media & internet technology.

DX Social enables brands to drive social engagement across multiple media channels. As part of an integrated, cross-channel platform, DX Social creates and uses consumer insights to maximize digital marketing effectiveness. By employing DataXu’s core impression-level decisioning capability for online display, mobile, and video campaigns, DX Social uncovers unique consumer insights that are used to target and optimize ad spend in social media platforms like Facebook.

“Social networks like Facebook present a huge opportunity for brands and agencies. But the most successful social campaigns work within a holistic marketing strategy, using insights from mobile, online display, and video efforts,” said Mark Miller, SVP of Strategy and Analysis at Digitas, a top global integrated brand agency. “Consumers don’t live in silos, and smart, active brands understand the need to reach them as they move across multiple channels in their day-to-day lives. DX Social facilitates that through one central platform that manages and reports on all multichannel campaigns, capturing unique consumer insights for driving future campaign strategies.”

DX Social introduces three powerful tactics to harness the social Web to achieve marketing objectives:
-       Social Discovery – Increases brand-relevant social activities, such as “likes” or “event RSVPs” using display, video, or mobile media
-       Social Media Optimization – Increases the effectiveness of social media, such as Facebook, by leveraging insights gained from running non-Facebook media
-       Social Retargeting – Targets known influencers to drive social marketing objectives or traditional online KPIs

“The increase in Facebook followers we achieved during our campaign using DX Social is unlike anything we previously generated,” said Steven ‘Lounge’ Price, director of digital strategy at SIMPLE Mobile. “We added hundreds of fans every hour, and achieved a monthly lift of 661% in just four days. Also notable was the lack of erosion (unlikes) from new fans. ”

For more on SIMPLE Mobile’s use of DX Social to leverage online display insights for driving Facebook campaign performance, please go to: http://www.dataxu.com/for-you/case-studies/dx-social-simple-mobile-gets-connected-on-facebook

“True to our overarching vision of delivering a unified view of the consumer, DX Social harnesses the full power of the social Web in a new, powerful way ,” stated Mike Baker, CEO of DataXu.  “Even with the granular targeting offered by platform like Facebook, adding behavioral audience insights moves the needle big time.  It’s clear that marketers with a superior understanding of their audience will gain more social mindshare.”

About DataXu
Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, DataXu provides the only cross-channel Demand Side Platform for online, mobile, social and video advertisers. Impression level decisioning and actionable analytics increase digital campaign performance, improves operational efficiencies and delivers unique consumer insights to advertisers. DataXu’s executive team unites leading executives in digital media with MIT technologists. The private company is backed by Atlas Venture, Flybridge Capital Partners and Menlo Ventures. For more information, visit www.dataxu.com or follow us on Twitter at @dataxu.

SAN MATEO, Calif. – BrightEdge, the world’s first enterprise class SEO platform that helps brands rise above the increasing clutter of the Web, released a new SocialShare report today that shows the power and influence of the Facebook “Like” button for viral discovery and distribution. Since the launch of the “Like” and “Share” buttons, links to the front pages of the top 1,000 sites on the Web have been liked and shared on Facebook more than 65 million times.

The analysis also looked at these top 1,000 sites to learn which Facebook share buttons have gained the most ubiquity. BrightEdge for the first time was able to rank Facebook’s many share buttons in a top 10 rank based on usage on the Web’s largest and most trafficked sites.

“Changes to Facebook social plugins may be imminent and this analysis shows how significant these features have become on the Web today,” said Jim Yu, CEO of BrightEdge. “Very few features have achieved the massive scale of adoption that Facebook ‘Like ‘and ‘Share’ buttons now see across the Internet. And the usage of these buttons is unprecedented in the history of the Web.”

The BrightEdge SocialShare Engine also was able to learn for the first time ever that 25 percent of the top 1,000 web sites have adopted Facebook plugins. The “Like” Button is the most utilized share feature that Facebook offers. It lets users share pages from a site directly on their Facebook profile with a single click of a button.

The report states that Facebook plugins are offering increased insight into user interest, rapidly transforming Facebook from a social graph of connections between people to an interest graph that reflects the social signals about interests, opinions and desires.

BrightEdge says this transition creates opportunity for marketers to understand and utilize signals to drive traffic in the face of increasing adoption of social buttons (see September SocialShare). Facebook is now offering marketers increased relevance with which to measure and take action on this social signal stream.

Marketers continue to look for ways to capitalize on the trend of user driven marketing, where billions of potential customers are searching, sharing, wanting and subscribing to products, services and brands. This is the edge of marketing’s funnel, where users are in control of their search and social activity, and marketers look to understand and convert prospective customers based on the signals they are sending.

The BrightEdge analysis examines and analyzes the front pages of the world’s 1,000 most trafficked sites. The analysis seeks to measure the presence of social plugins on these large web properties and the presence of links to social pages. The monthly SocialShare Analysis provides an important window into the growth and utilization of social tools by the world’s most well known brands.

To download the latest BrightEdge SocialShare report, please visit: http://www2.brightedge.com/social-share-September-2011-FBSpecial.

About BrightEdge

BrightEdge is the leading enterprise SEO platform and the trusted partner of the largest and most recognizable brands in the world. BrightEdge helps marketers rise above the increasing clutter of the web and drive organic revenue from search engines across the globe in a measurable, predictable way. The BrightEdge SEO technology drives more than $3 billion in organic search revenue for leading brands across industries, including seven of the top 10 retailers, and Fortune 1000 leaders in e-commerce, technology, media, Internet, financial services and consumer goods. BrightEdge is based in San Mateo, CA and is privately held with financing from Battery Ventures, Altos Ventures and Illuminate Ventures.

f8 Developer Conference 2011
SAN FRANCISCO – f8 Developer Conference – Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO), the premier digital media company, today announced a new way to discover and connect with the world’s most popular content on both Yahoo! and Facebook. Beginning with Yahoo! News in the U.S., the No. 1 online news destination with more than 80 million unique monthly visitors*, and IntoNow from Yahoo!, the mobile app to discover and discuss TV shows, Yahoo! is putting people’s friends front and center to usher in an innovative way of connecting around content socially.

Today’s launch marks a new phase in Yahoo!’s relationship with Facebook and a milestone in Yahoo!’s strategy to infuse increasingly social and personalized experiences across the company’s global portfolio of premier digital media content.

“The world’s most interesting content and editorial is on Yahoo!, and now more than ever our audience looks to their friends for inspiration on what to read and watch from our vast network,” said Blake Irving, chief product officer, Yahoo!. “Through our seamless integration with Facebook, we’re promoting your friends to the status of social editors on Yahoo!, making it simple to let your friends guide you to more stories, shows, and information than ever before.”

Discover and Connect Around News and Express What You’re Into on TV

The new Yahoo! News friends’ activity feature lets people discover and connect around the news and information they are enjoying on Yahoo! seamlessly through updates on Facebook. A straightforward opt-in process launches people into the immersive social experience:

Control What You Share – By opting-in to the new feature, people can see their Facebook friends’ and the recent articles they’ve read. People’s activity will also be featured back on their Facebook profile as it happens. It’s easy to turn it on and off and delete items.
You on Yahoo! News – People will have a lightweight dashboard that provides a clear view into their activity.
Your Friends’ Activity – Shows Facebook friends and what they’re reading on Yahoo! in a new “facebar” at the top of Yahoo! News.
Your Friends’ Tab – For friends who have also opted-in, displays the articles they’ve recently viewed.
As part of the new social content experience, people will also be able to feature their TV watching activity on IntoNow from Yahoo! on their Facebook profile. This content will appear on people’s profiles under “Most Watched” and “Most Recently Watched.” People will also be able to discover new content based on their friends’ activity.

“People have been sharing links to news articles with friends on Facebook for years, and today Yahoo! is deepening its Facebook integration to make social news even more seamless,” said Ethan Beard, director platform partnerships, Facebook. “Using our new features, Yahoo! is personalizing the news experience for readers, and giving them new ways to express their favorite Yahoo! content on their Facebook profile, and discover more relevant news though friends.”

The friends’ activity feature will be incorporated into other media properties across the Yahoo! network and rolled out in additional international markets in the coming months.

For more information on the Yahoo! News friends’ activity feature, visit news.yahoo.com/activity-learn-more and our company blog, Yodel Anecdotal, at yodel.yahoo.com. For more information on IntoNow from Yahoo!, visit intonow.com.

*comScore Media Metrix, June 2011

About Yahoo!

Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO) is the premier digital media company, creating deeply personal digital experiences that keep more than half a billion people connected to what matters most to them, across devices and around the globe. And Yahoo!’s unique combination of Science + Art + Scale connects advertisers to the consumers who build their businesses. Yahoo! is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. For more information, visit the pressroom (pressroom.yahoo.com) or the company’s blog, Yodel Anecdotal (yodel.yahoo.com).

INDIANAPOLIS – A new study released today by global interactive marketing provider ExactTarget finds 93 percent of Facebook users click the “Like” button at least monthly, but the meaning behind “Like” varies considerably by age and context.

Featured in The Meaning of Like, the latest in ExactTarget’s Subscribers, Fans and Followers research series, the study found the most common uses of “Like” related to posts made by friends, followed by clicking the “Like” button on sites outside of Facebook as a form of ‘social bookmarking.’

“With Facebook such a vital part of the online social fabric, marketers need to be smart and strategic when developing campaigns on Facebook,” said Jeff Rohrs, vice president, ExactTarget’s Marketing Research and Education Group. “A click of the ‘Like’ button means different things to different people. It creates an opportunity for further engagement, but it is merely one step toward the types of meaningful, cross-channel relationships marketers need to succeed.”

According to the research, a universal meaning of “Like” has yet to emerge largely because a click depends on the individual consumer and the context in which the “Like” button is used, Rohrs said.

Key findings of the research include:

- 45 percent of Facebook users say they “Like” a company at least monthly, while 35 percent say they never “Like” a company.
- 44 percent “Like” something posted by a company on Facebook at least once a month.
- “Like” is not the same thing as permission – 15 percent say “Liking” a company’s Facebook page should “Always” be interpreted as permission to post marketing messages that appear in a user’s news feed, while 39 percent say their “Like” should “Never” be interpreted as permission.
- People who “Like” a lot of brands (11 or more) are more likely to be motivated by rewards in the form of coupons or exclusive deals in exchange for their “Like.”
- Younger consumers (age 18-26) tend to use “Like” for self-expression and public endorsement of a brand.
- Consumers 27 and older are more likely to expect something of value in exchange for their “Like.”
- Among people that have “Liked” at least one brand, 31 percent have avoided “Liking” more brands because they do not want to push things into their friends’ newsfeeds.
- The average U.S. Facebook user “Likes” an average of 14 companies/brands.

“Facebook has emerged an essential interactive channel for brands to create engaging experiences and share relevant content,” said Tim Kopp, ExactTarget’s chief marketing officer. “The Meaning of Like provides marketers exclusive new insights on what consumers expect from brands on Facebook and offers recommendations on how to integrate the channel into the broader marketing mix.”

Based on a series of focus groups, interviews and surveys conducted in May and June 2011, The Meaning of Like is the tenth report in ExactTarget’s Subscribers, Fans & Followers research series. For more information about the study and to access the Subscribers, Fans & Followers data, visit www.ExactTarget.com/sff.

The debut of the research comes less than a week after ExactTarget launched its SocialPages application, a solution that enables marketers to create and integrate branded Facebook pages into cross-channel interactive marketing campaigns. Built as an application on the ExactTarget Interactive Marketing Hub, SocialPages provides a drag and drop interface to create and manage branded Facebook tabs and monitor real-time performance and cross-channel engagement across email, mobile, social media and the Web. For more information about ExactTarget’s SocialPages application, click here.

About ExactTarget

ExactTarget is a leading global provider of on-demand email marketing and interactive marketing solutions. The company’s Interactive Marketing Hub TM technology provides organizations a single solution to connect with customers via email, integrated text messaging, landing pages and social media. Supported by collaborative global services teams, ExactTarget’s technology integrates with more sales and marketing information systems than any other in the industry, including Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Adobe Omniture and Webtrends among many others. ExactTarget powers permission-based cross-channel communications for thousands of organizations around the world including Expedia.com, Best Buy, Papa John’s, CareerBuilder.com, Gannett Co., Inc., The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, The Home Depot and Wellpoint, Inc. For more information, visit www.exacttarget.com.

The symbiosis of social networks and mobile phones can also be seen in recent moves by Google and Apple. Google’s attempt at social networking, Google+, has been designed to benefit from deep integration with Android, which is likely to go down well with application developers. Meanwhile, Apple has teamed up with Twitter and built the microblogging service into the iOS 5. According to practice director Dan Shey, “The interesting aspect in Apple’s and Twitter’s partnership is how it can provide iPhone users with a verifiable social identity for websites and apps. That gives developers a lot of scope to innovate in areas such as authentication, personalization and advertising. It’s a hint of things to come.”

ABI Research’s “Mobile Social Networking” (http://www.abiresearch.com/research/1003728) studies how mobile usage is influencing the ways in which consumers access and interact with social networking services. It analyzes the industry’s most decisive business, competitive and technological issues. The report also includes forecasts of user bases and revenues, broken down to regions and 20 different countries, and provides relevant findings from ABI Research’s recent consumer surveys.

It is part of the Mobile Services (http://www.abiresearch.com/products/service/The_Mobile_Consumer_Research_Service) research service.

ABI Research provides in-depth analysis and quantitative forecasting of trends in global connectivity and other emerging technologies. From offices in North America, Europe and Asia, ABI Research’s worldwide team of experts advises thousands of decision makers through 40+ research and advisory services. Est. 1990. For more information visit www.abiresearch.com, or call +1.516.624.2500.

Acquisition Will Create One of the Largest Social Media Content Companies with over 240 Million Users & 100,000 Publishers —Creating the First Paid, Owned & Earned Media Platforms for Brands

BRISBANE, Calif. – Glam Media, Inc. (www.GlamMedia.com), the number one vertical social content platform company with the largest online global reach for women, today announced that it is acquiring Ning (www.ning.com), the leading online platform for building social websites, including more than 100,000 custom branded fan sites.

“Ning is the clear leader for creating custom social websites and communities. Acquiring Ning adds a natural extension to our social media platform, new distribution channels and a talented Silicon Valley team, all of which support our aim to connect brands with engaged, passionate audiences,” said Samir Arora, Chairman and CEO of Glam Media. “With the addition of Ning, Glam Media will truly become the first next generation media company in the post-social world.”

Since launching the first social blog community in 2005, Glam Media has experienced tremendous success, growing from just seven publishers and 12 authors to more than 2,500 publishers and 4,000 authors globally today. The company has trusted relationships with more than 1,000 leading brand advertisers and is a Top 10 web property with more than 85 million monthly unique visitors in the U.S. and more than 200 million globally.

Combining Ning’s world-class technology and deeply engaging social platforms with Glam Media’s super premium advertising solutions and reach will accelerate the company’s vision of bringing brand marketers online by helping them to engage with passionate social communities across all digital mediums.

Glam Media together with Ning will set the standard for the future of media by providing their clients with the reach of portals, the deep connections and interests of Facebook, and the influence of trusted conversations.

“Social media is transforming the way brands are reaching their audiences. The Ning platform and its Network Creators, combined with the power of Glam’s advertising solutions, will ignite the delivery of our Brands+Social integrated programs at significant scale,” said Fernando Ruarte, CTO & EVP Platform & Products at Glam Media. “Together, Glam and Ning will address important challenges that currently exist for marketers by enabling social media-activated brand campaigns to run in contextual environments that go beyond the few large social networking sites that exist today.”

Ning

Founded in 2004, Ning is the world’s largest custom platform for social communities and networks. The company has experienced explosive growth since it successfully moved to a subscription-based business model led by CEO Jason Rosenthal. Since 2010, Ning has increased the number of paying customers from 17,000 to more than 100,000 and grown its revenue by over 500 percent. Today, Ning has more than 100 million registered user social profiles and reaches more than 60 million monthly unique visitors. The company’s customers are the most active champions of brands, causes and organizations seeking to make an impact in the world using social media.

Ning makes it easy for brands of all sizes to build custom and powerful social brand fan pages and web sites as diverse as Linkin Park’s fan social network, Martha Stewart’s mentorship community, Scott Brown’s virtual campaign office and the collaborative hub for the Peace Corps. More than 50 percent of Ning sites are integrated with social applications such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+, which helps to amplify messages across each member’s social graph.

Ning will operate as a new business unit within Glam Media. Jason Rosenthal, Ning’s CEO, will join Glam as EVP Social Media & General Manager of Ning, and will be a member of the Glam Media executive team.

“Our passion at Ning has always been to make social and mobile core to every web experience, and to leverage the power of community to change the world and drive value for customers,” said Jason Rosenthal, CEO of Ning. “Connecting our customers with super premium brand advertisers has been a core part of our vision from the earliest days of the company and joining with Glam Media – which shares our roots and belief in the power of social – delivers on that promise.”

Additionally, Marc Andreessen will join Glam Media’s board of directors, joining the top venture firm investors in Glam — Accel’s Thereisa Ranzetta and DFJ’s Tim Draper — as well as Co-Founder of Glam Media Fernando Ruarte, Dr Marcel Reichart from print media leader Hubert Burda Media, and Glam Media Founder & Chairman Samir Arora. Marc is a Silicon Valley pioneer who created Mosaic, the first web-browser and was the co-founder of Netscape Communications. In 2009, Marc created the venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, with Ben Horowitz that invests in leading edge technology companies. He currently serves on the boards of Facebook, HP, eBay and other leading technology companies.

“Glam Media is one of the most dynamic companies in the digital media space, and I am excited to help guide their further expansion,” said Marc Andreessen. “With the fusion of Ning’s leadership and social networking technology, and Glam’s solid stake in the world of digital advertising, publishing and content creation, there’s no limit to where we can take the company.”

Platforms and Products for Brands and Publishers

Ning joins Glam Media’s suite of next-generation advertising, social, and content platforms, which include:

GlamAdapt – super premium ad serving platform
GlamMobile – full-scale mobile advertising, content and social platform
GlamCreate – content creation management platform
GlamEnable – content platform to enable mobile sites and applications
GlamConnect – first social networking platform for professional authors and bloggers

The acquisition of Ning will allow Glam Media to provide its 2,500 publishers and 4,000 authors with even more innovative ways to connect, create and broadcast authentic content across multiple mediums and social streams – all in one place. Glam publishers will be able to leverage new services that enable them to grow their audiences on desktop, mobile and video and increase frequency, leading to higher levels of engagement.

Additionally, Ning Creators running active online communities will have new opportunities on desktop and mobile devices to monetize their sites and grow successful businesses.

For more information about Glam Media, visit: www.glammedia.com.

About Glam Media

Glam Media is the pioneer of vertical media that connects the world’s top brand advertisers with targeted vertical audiences online. Glam invented the first commercial blog network in 2005 to harness the power of Social Media for brands. Since then, it has grown to a reach of 85 million unique monthly visitors in the U.S. and more than 200 million globally, and is #1 for women and is a Top 100 US Web Property. Glam Media has more than 2,500 publishers organized across multiple vertical categories online including: Glam.com for Women, Glam Entertainment for Adults, Brash.com for Men and Bliss.com for health and wellness seekers.

Glam Media has headquarters in Silicon Valley, New York, and London, with offices in Brisbane in California, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, London, Munich, Hamburg, Berlin, Düsseldorf, Tokyo, Pune, Mumbai and Paris. Glam Media’s investors include Information Capital, Accel, DFJ, Walden Ventures, Hubert Burda Media, GLG, and Aeris.

About Ning

Ning is the leading online platform for the world’s organizers, activists and influencers to create social experiences that inspire action. For brands of all shapes and sizes, Ning makes it easy to build custom and powerful social websites. Ning Networks span categories like politics, entertainment, small business, non-profits, education and more, connecting millions of people every day around the topics they are passionate about. Palo Alto, Calif.-based Ning was co-founded in October 2004 by Chairman Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini. For more information, visit www.ning.com.

Los Angeles, CA – A new study issued today by KN Dimestore and SocialVibe shows that incentivized advertising works to drive active attention to a brand message and significantly increases brand perception and purchase intent. According to the study, more than 90 percent of people pay active attention to the brand message when interacting with incentivized engagements, and brand perception rises an average of 38 percent after completing the engagement.

Pioneered by SocialVibe, the incentivized brand advertising model allows advertisers to offer consumers something they value – such as virtual currency for a social game, or making a donation to charity – in exchange for paying attention to an engagement ad. People have opportunities to interact with incentivized ads on Web properties such as Pandora and Facebook as well as social games such as Zynga’s FarmVille and CityVille. As value-exchange brand advertising asks only for a consumer’s attention, it differs from offer-based, cost-per-action (CPA) advertising that typically requires an ancillary sign-up or purchase by the consumer.

The KN Dimestore study was undertaken during June and July of 2011 and included more than 30,000 consumers, who were exposed to incentivized ads from top U.S. brands across the financial services, CPG, entertainment, e-commerce and technology categories.

Key findings from the study include:

1. Incentivized advertising drives active attention to a brand message.

KN Dimestore saw that 91 percent of people look for or pay attention to the brand message when interacting with incentivized engagements, meaning that consumers aren’t simply interacting with an ad just to reap the rewards of a value-exchange. Notably, 48 percent reported that while they may initially opt-in to a brand engagement for the incentive, they end up staying and paying attention to the brand message.

2. Incentivized advertising increases brand perception.

The study revealed an average increase in brand perception of 38 percent, ranging from 18 to 77 percent, across the eight different brands participating in the study. For instance, positive brand perception of a packaged good product rose 22 points, or 77 percent, after consumers completed an incentivized engagement from the brand. The overall study showed that regardless of vertical – financial services, CPG, entertainment or technology—consumers are likely to have a more positive perception of a brand as a result of interacting with a brand-delivered incentivized engagement.

3. People who engage with incentivized brand advertising are more likely to consider the brand during the purchase process.

Respondents to the study revealed that after completing the engagement, purchase consideration against competitive brands increased. For example, when participants were asked, “Which of the six brands are you most likely to consider buying the next time you’re at the store?”, a category-leading CPG product saw a 23 point lift, or a 56 percent increase over the control group.

Furthermore, when survey participants were asked about intent to purchase a brand, another CPG product in the study showed a lift of 32 points—or a 110 percent increase. A similar lift was seen in the entertainment category, in which the intent to view a specific television show increased 32 points.

4. Incentivized advertising drives website and in-store traffic.

Consumers exposed to an incentivized engagement were 161 percent more likely to visit the brand’s website and 36 percent more likely to shop for the brand at the store location after completing the engagement. For example, people exposed to a brand engagement from a leading snack brand were 42 percent more likely to look for the brand at the store after completing an engagement.

5. Incentivized advertising also works to drive purchases and conversions.

As part of the KN Dimestore study and for the premiere of a recent blockbuster film, a major movie studio ran a value-exchange campaign through SocialVibe that offered Zynga game players the opportunity to earn virtual currency in exchange for interacting with the movie’s engagement ad. KN Dimestore then surveyed consumers who had both interacted, as well as not interacted, with the ad, asking if they had gone to see the movie in theaters. The study revealed that 32 out of every 100 people exposed to the engagement had bought tickets and seen the movie, a 22 percent lift over those who had not completed the brand engagement.

“This study clearly shows that the value-exchange approach works to impact every stage of the purchase process,” said Benjamin Theriault, vice president of Sales at KN Dimestore. “The study results exceeded what we anticipated – these ads delivered very strong results in brand lift and the response rates were some of the best we’ve seen. The unique opt-in ad units provided an opportunity for us, and for the brands who participated in the study, to engage consumers in a one-on-one conversation to understand how they interact with incentivized ads.”

“There’s been a debate around value-exchange advertising that stems from an unfounded assumption that consumers looking for the incentive will merely ‘sit through’ an ad simply in exchange for the benefit,” said Jay Samit, CEO for SocialVibe. “The KN Dimestore study shows without a doubt that not only does incentivized advertising work, it works better than any other form of brand advertising out there. People go online with a purpose, and most forms of advertising, such as display and pre-roll, are disruptive and not additive to that experience. The way to capture a consumer’s real attention is to respect their time commitment through the value-exchange approach.”

To see examples of value-exchange engagements from leading brands, please visit:
http://advertising.socialvibe.com/gallery

For more information about the study methodology and to view the full results, please visit: http://media.socialvibe.com/m/pdfs/SocialVibe_Dimestore_Research_Final.pdf

About KN Dimestore
KN Dimestore, a subsidiary of Knowledge Networks – one of the top 25 custom market research companies in the U.S. – provides cost-effective and easy-to-implement online ad effectiveness measurement solutions to agencies, networks, and online publishers. Developed by online advertising insiders, the company’s survey technology allows clients to conduct multi-question custom surveys within the footprint of the ad campaign without requiring overlays or pop-up invitations. For more information, go to www.knowledgenetworks.com/dimestore.

About SocialVibe
SocialVibe is a digital advertising technology company that provides the most effective form of brand advertising for some of the world’s top brands. Unlike ad networks that simply deliver impressions through display advertising, SocialVibe provides opt-in engagements that consumers can share across their social graph. SocialVibe enables advertisers to engage at a time when consumers are most motivated to participate in brand experiences, such as while playing a social game, donating to charity or accessing premium content. SocialVibe enables engagements on the Web and on mobile, reaching a universe of more than 600 million socially-connected global consumers. Visit www.socialvibe.com or check out twitter.com/SocialVibeAds.

Further barriers are erected when the casual gaming element is added. Tencent, Cyworld, and GREE, for instance, are among the market leaders in their respective countries (China, South Korea, and Japan) and each company operates in both the social networking and online gaming markets. In addition, partnerships have formed between these companies to facilitate game development across developers and countries, which could further heighten the barriers to entry: e.g. GREE and Tencent, and Mixi (Japan) with RenRen (China) and Cyworld. The social networking value chain also extends beyond the SNS alone, impacting a myriad of content providers, device manufactures, and platform developers alike.

In fact, social networking is starting to diffuse to all facets of the connected world – although computers remain the primary social networking tool. According to digital home practice director Jason Blackwell, “Mobile devices in particular will prove an essential ingredient to the development and evolution of social networking. This is especially true in developing markets where mobile broadband is expected to help drive Internet connectivity – although this is applicable to some developed markets like Japan as well.” Mobile devices will also play a key role in the connected CE market, working in conjunction with fixed devices for interactive features like gaming, polling/voting, content sharing, and general user interface applications. Despite the attention to a few operators, both Blackwell and Inouye stressed that while Facebook may be the largest SNS in the world, it is only one part of the greater social networking ecosystem.

ABI Research’s new report, “Social Networking and Consumer Electronics,” (http://www.abiresearch.com/research/1003729) focuses on the social networking market, with an emphasis on services and users.

ABI Research provides in-depth analysis and quantitative forecasting of trends in global connectivity and other emerging technologies. From offices in North America, Europe and Asia, ABI Research’s worldwide team of experts advises thousands of decision makers through 40+ research and advisory services. Est. 1990. For more information visit www.abiresearch.com, or call +1.516.624.2500.

WASHINGTON – SocialCode, a full-service Facebook agency working with top global brands and agencies to translate their marketing goals on to Facebook, today announced results from a new Facebook advertising research study. The research examined over four million data points across over 50 clients from a wide variety of industries to get a better understanding of how age and gender affect click-through rates (CTR) and ‘Like’ rates on Facebook. Results show that for ads with a ‘Like’ button, older Facebook users have a higher CTR while younger Facebook users will tend to click ‘Like’ directly within the Facebook ad.

“In general, younger Facebook users are more comfortable using the ‘Like’ button than older users at this point,” said Laura O’Shaughnessy, CEO, SocialCode. “With inline fan ads on Facebook, older users have a high level of interaction and curiosity about the ads as evidenced by their high CTRs, whereas younger users have a higher propensity to click the ‘Like’ button right in an ad on Facebook. We assume that while older users are adopting Facebook at a high rate, they are also the newest subset to join the social network, meaning they may not have high friend numbers so ads are less likely to have social context in advertisements.”

AGE FINDINGS

The SocialCode study found that while age has a strong positive effect on whether a user will click; it oftentimes has the opposite effect on the likelihood of the user becoming a fan of a page.

- 50+ year-old users, the oldest segment in the study, are 28.2 percent more likely to click through and 9 percent less likely to ‘Like’ than 18-29 year-old users, the youngest group observed
- Versus the rest of the younger population on Facebook, 50+ users see a 22.6 percent higher CTR and 8.4 percent lower ‘Like’ rate

GENDER FINDINGS

When broken down by gender, age has a much more pronounced effect on CTR for women than it does for men, whereas for men there is a stronger effect on ‘Like’ rate than women.

- Overall, women are 11 percent more likely to click on an ad
- ‘Like’ rates are almost even for men and women; men are actually 2.2 percent more likely to ‘Like’ an ad than women
- For women, CTR is 31.2 percent higher for the 50+ age group versus 18-29 year olds, men only see a 16.2 percent difference between the age groups
- Versus all age groups, 50+ women’s CTR is 22 percent higher versus a 16.4 percent difference for males
- The oldest male segment has an 11.7 percent lower ‘Like’ rate than the youngest segment, and 9.5 percent lower ‘Like’ rate versus all age groups. Women only see a 7.2 percent and 7.9 percent difference respectively

The age and gender research study conducted by SocialCode examined over four million data points for ads containing a ‘Like’ button across over 50 clients in different verticals for the past ten months. While performance varies greatly based on multiple variables, this study looks at the aggregate trends for gender and age seen in the marketplace.

About SocialCode

SocialCode is a full-service Facebook agency specializing in performance marketing. SocialCode’s unique tools are built on a research engine that offers analytics and information for advertisers that far surpasses what they could get anywhere else. With advanced quantitative methods, SocialCode specializes in building targeted communities, engaging those audiences and monetizing potential customers all while conducting research to inform strategy.

NEW YORK – Jun Group (www.jungroup.com), the premier social video company, announced the hiring of four new digital marketing professionals to its growing social video team, to better serve its Fortune 500 brands and media agency clients.

“It is exciting to have people of this caliber join our team,” said Mitchell Reichgut, founder and CEO of Jun Group. “We’re experiencing tremendous growth, and our ability to attract top-level talent is a key factor in our future success. I couldn’t be happier with the choices we’ve made.”

Amanda Grasham and Amy Vecsi join Jun Group’s national sales team as sales directors in Chicago and Los Angeles, respectively. The account services team welcomes Theodora Valovska, producer, and Sarah Wuennemann, account coordinator.

Amanda Grasham, Sales Director
Grasham joins Jun Group from Specific Media, formerly BBE, where she served as director, Midwest sales. Serving clients from Jun Group’s Chicago office, Grasham brings extensive video experience, including stints at Tremor Media and NBC Universal’s iVillage, to her new position. Grasham began her career in the agency world working at, most recently, Starcom Worldwide and OMD.

Amy Vecsi, Sales Director
Vecsi, most recently, served as account executive at Medialets and joins Jun Group with extensive experience working with brands, agencies and Web publishers. Based in the company’s Los Angeles office, her experience also includes sales positions with quadrantONE and Tribune Interactive.

Theodora Valovska, Producer
Recently transplanted from San Diego to New York City, Valovska joins Jun Group as producer and a key part of the account management team. A graduate of the University of San Diego where she earned a B.A. in Communications with an emphasis on Images and Influence, Valovska is responsible for driving the execution of social video campaigns.

Sarah Wuennemann, Account Coordinator
Wuennenmann joins Jun Group from Dynamic Logic where she served as associate research analyst. As Account Coordinator, Wuennenmann is also part of Jun Group’s account management team in New York City, driving the implementation of social video campaigns.

Jun Group has a number of openings on its social video team. To learn more visit:
http://jungroup.jobscore.com/list.

About Jun Group
Jun Group (www.jungroup.com) is the premier social video company, and an advertising provider on the Facebook platform. The company delivers millions of monthly opt-in video views across social networks, mobile devices, and YouTube. Jun Group’s analytics dashboard, Voyeur, provides real-time insights into shares, Facebook “Likes,” tweets, ratings, comments and geographic data down to the state and town. Founded in 2005, Jun Group’s clients include Fortune 500 brands, major entertainment companies, and media agencies. For more information, visit www.jungroup.com.

BOSTON – Nanigans, Inc., the only real-time bidding platform for Facebook that optimizes advertiser spend for downstream actions and lifetime customer value, has closed $3M in Series A financing.

Leading the round is Avalon Ventures, and includes several prominent Boston-based Angel investors. Rich Levandov, Managing Director at Avalon Ventures who led initial investment in social gaming company Zynga and behavioral ad targeting company Tacoda, joins the Board. Nanigans will use the financing to expand its team and its Ad Engine platform.

Nanigans, one of the first Facebook Ads API Partners, delivers social ads for over 200 customers including Bonobos, CrowdStar, EA, Gilt Groupe, PopCap Games, and RockYou. The company offers the most advanced Facebook advertising solution, automating campaign management at scale and optimizing for downstream actions such as Likes, app installs, registrations, virality and purchases.

“Nanigans is unique in its focus on building social advertising technology that delivers true value and return on advertiser spend,” said Rich Levandov, Managing Director at Avalon Ventures. “We look forward to providing the company with the support necessary to continue to accelerate its growth and product innovation.”

According to comScore, Facebook is the #1 online display ad publisher in the US, accounting for a third of total online display ad impressions. Nanigans will serve tens of billions of ad impressions this month as the company expands its team, product development, and partnerships.

“Facebook is unprecedented in its reach and targeting parameters, and advertising dollars are following. Our Ad Engine enables marketers to automate the delivery of social ads at scale — and in a way that focuses on delivering customers, and not clicks,” explained Ric Calvillo, founder and CEO of Nanigans. “We look forward to working with our new investors who are experienced in scaling successful companies in the social and behavioral ad targeting spaces.”

Nanigans recently made several executive hires to accelerate its product development, including:

Rishi Dean, SVP Product, a former Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the MIT Entrepreneurship Center who comes to Nanigans after being the first employee of Visible Measures and helping build the company into the leading online video measurement platform;
Derek Yimoyines, VP Engineering, who comes to Nanigans from Avenue100 Media where he led the company’s software development team;
John Saitta, SVP Operations, who comes to Nanigans from Visible Measures where he was VP of Operations and prior to that VP of Information Technology at Vanguard Direct.

About Nanigans

Nanigans is the only real-time bidding platform for the Facebook ads marketplace that optimizes for downstream actions and lifetime customer value. Nanigans’ Ad Engine enables marketers to automate the labor-intensive process of delivering social ads at scale and overcome the challenges involved in optimizing for ROI.

One of the first Official Facebook Ads API Partners, Nanigans drives billions of social ad impressions each month for over 200 companies including Bonobos, CrowdStar, EA, Gilt Groupe, PopCap Games and RockYou. To learn more, visit www.nanigans.com.

Playfish, an Electronic Arts Inc. Studio (NASDAQ: ERTS) and a leading creator of social games (#2 in the Social Game category, according to AppData), has selected Nanigans, Inc as its exclusive Facebook® advertising technology partner. Playfish and over 200 other leading companies use the Nanigans Ad Engine platform to boost ROI through real-time bidding and optimizing advertising spend for players who actually generate revenue.

Playfish has licensed the Nanigans Ad Engine platform to efficiently advertise across its entire portfolio of social games. Playfish will have first access to new features on the Ad Engine platform, and will use it to further strengthen its strategic marketing advantage. Playfish has already used the Nanigans Ad Engine platform on games such as Madden NFL Superstars, MONOPOLY Millionaires and Restaurant City.

“We purpose-built our platform to automate as much of campaign management as possible, and at the same time, optimize for downstream conversion, particularly revenue and ROI,” said Ric Calvillo, CEO of Nanigans.

“With the Nanigans platform we can run much more sophisticated campaigns and optimize for high profitability, not just low cost per install,” said CJ Prober, VP Publishing and Product Management, at Playfish. “While Playfish welcomes all players equally, partnering with Nanigans enables us to find our most enthusiastic and biggest spending fans.”

The Nanigans Ad Engine gives Playfish and EA the intelligence and automation that they’re seeking and allows them to bid on an ROI basis in real-time. It frees advertising campaign managers from time-intensive manual bid and budget management, while giving them powerful analytical tools for finding the most profitable ad creative and targeting.

NANIGANS AD ENGINE

The Ad Engine is a software platform that integrates with the Facebook® Ads API to deliver precise targeting, multivariate testing and improved ROI. Its real-time bidding algorithms optimize for downstream value and actions such as installs, tutorial completions, virality and purchases. Nanigans offers the Ad Engine in a range of service and pricing models – from a pure platform software license to a fully managed pay-for-performance service.

PLAYFISH

Established in 2007 and acquired by EA in 2009, Playfish is the world’s #2 publisher of social games on Facebook® with popular titles like Pet Society™, Restaurant City, FIFA Superstars, Madden NFL Superstars and MONOPOLY Millionaires.

“As a social gaming pioneer, Playfish helped shape the face of the Facebook® platform through original titles and classic EA franchises such as Pet Society, FIFA Superstars and MONOPOLY Millionaires,” says CJ Prober, Vice President of Publishing and Product Management for Playfish. “Playfish is looking forward to continuing our tradition of innovation and quality by leveraging the Nanigans Ad Engine Platform.”

In recent years EA has aggressively expanded its digital business interests in numerous gaming channels, fostering growth in the social network gaming sector with Playfish. Since 2007, more than 350 million Playfish games have been installed by millions of players around the world on social platforms such as Facebook® and others.

About Nanigans

Nanigans is the only real-time bidding platform for the Facebook ads marketplace that optimizes for downstream actions and lifetime customer value. Nanigans’ Ad Engine enables marketers to automate the labor-intensive process of delivering social ads at scale and overcome the challenges involved in optimizing for ROI. One of the first Official Facebook Ads API Partners, Nanigans drives billions of social ad impressions each month for over 200 companies including Bonobos, CrowdStar, EA, Gilt Groupe, PopCap Games and RockYou. To learn more, visit www.nanigans.com.

About Electronic Arts

Electronic Arts Inc. (EA), headquartered in Redwood City, California, is a leading global interactive entertainment software company. Founded in 1982, the Company develops, publishes, and distributes interactive software worldwide for video game systems, personal computers, wireless devices and the Internet. Electronic Arts markets its products under four brand names: EA SPORTS™, EA™, EA Mobile™ and POGO™. In fiscal 2010, EA posted GAAP net revenue of $3.7 billion and had 27 titles that sold more than one million units. EA’s homepage and online game site is www.ea.com. More information about EA’s products and full text of press releases can be found on the Internet at http://info.ea.com.

About Playfish

Since 2007, Playfish has led the social gaming industry in innovation and creativity with award-winning, category-defining games designed for friends to play together. The company is changing the way people play games by creating more social and connected experiences. To date, more than 350 million Playfish games have been installed and played by millions of people worldwide. Playfish games are amongst the most acclaimed and popular online, including Pet Society, Restaurant City, Monopoly Millionaires, FIFA Superstars and Madden NFL Superstars. Playfish has development studios in London, San Francisco, Beijing, Tokyo, Montreal, and Tromso, Norway, and is owned by Electronic Arts.

Ybrant Digital has official access to the Facebook Ads API, which allows developers to integrate into the Facebook Ads system and provide marketers with new solutions to manage Facebook Ads.

HYDERABAD, India – Ybrant Digital, the global digital marketing company, was officially chosen as one of Facebook’s Marketing API Partners. An exclusive list of worldwide partners including Ybrant Digital was selected to integrate the Facebook Marketing API, in order to help advertisers scale their Facebook presence. Official marketing partners can develop proprietary third party tools that offer advanced Ad creation, Campaign Management, Reporting, and further areas of specialization.

Facebook launched its Marketing Program on July 3rd, 2011 in order to improve the marketing efforts from brands and agencies in the entire Facebook Platform, as well as spread the voice about new features and best practices for digital marketing on Facebook. Ybrant Digital, which provides Facebook Ads solutions since 2009, successfully met a demanding threshold of requirements established by Facebook’s Marketing API team.

Ybrant FBM , the flagship Facebook Ads product, is an in-house tool that leverages the Ads API to serve an enhanced advertising solution. Combined with additional social networks in the Ybrant Social package, and cooperation with third parties such as application developers and page designers, this creates a complete solution for advertisers seeking to engage social network audiences effectively.

“After all the fruitful efforts in co-operation with Facebook, this announcement encourages the Ybrant team to keep establishing new standards in technology and best practices for ad serving, targeting and optimization. It also validates our position in the market as a leading global digital marketing provider.” Said Suresh Reddy, Chairman and CEO of Ybrant Digital.

The Ybrant FBM service successfully serves large-scale advertisers on Facebook’s Social Ads system. In parallel, Ybrant’s QCC is an attractive offering for publishers interested in quality display inventory running on their Facebook Applications. These services are fully incorporated with Ybrant’s Ad Center which centralizes management of the full range of digital media platforms, including social networks, display inventory, mobile advertising and more.

About Ybrant Digital: www.ybrantdigital.com

G+ has caught on swiftly, already reaching 18 million users purportedly with 8 million of those since the figure was announced as being 10m on July 14th 2011 and with an estimated 1 billion pieces of content having now been shared worldwide.

However, Google’s stated focus on consumers as opposed to brands and businesses, coupled with the fact that links used in G+ are denoted as ‘do follow’ links – the type of links which represent the greatest impact in search engine optimisation activity – indicate Google’s intention to favourably rank content from G+ users within search engine results pages (SERPs) in the future.

Pete Goold, Managing Director of Tech PR Agency, Punch, commented:

“Any open service which allows do follow links is ripe for abuse by spammers, which might indicate that the do follow functionality may be shut down at some point in the future, as with sites such as Digg in the past. However, in the short term, this is perhaps an incentive to encourage use of the service amongst influential SEOs.

“Whilst it’s still evolving of course, Google plus has done a great job of pulling functionality from other services – such as twitter and Instagram – whilst also integrating with other Google services, such as Gmail, to minimize the amount of effort required to get up and running. Unlike projects such as Google wave, which was much hyped but failed to deliver, the growth rate, even whilst in beta mode until July 21st, indicates that this particular service is going to be here to stay.”

For more information regarding Search, Social Media and PR Company Punch Communications, please contact +44 (0) 1858 411600 or info@punchcomms.com.

SUNNYVALE, Calif. – Advertising on Facebook continued to get more competitive in the second quarter of 2011, with Cost Per Clicks (CPCs) increasing by 22% from the first quarter of 2011. Brands that are actively acquiring fans on Facebook are on course to double their fan base Year on Year (YOY) by October, demonstrating an increasingly competitive marketplace for consumers’ attention. Meanwhile, search spend was up 8% in the second quarter of 2011, but down from 17% YoY in the first quarter, likely due to advertisers focusing on Return on Investment (ROI) instead of volume, as well as the continued slower-than-expected global economic recovery.

This is according to Efficient Frontier, a leading performance marketing company managing more than $1 billion in marketing spend annually on behalf of advertisers worldwide, and its subsidiary Context Optional, the leading provider of social marketing management for global brands and agencies. This data and specific industry trends were released today in the first joint Digital Marketing Performance Report for Q2 2011.

“Facebook advertising is moving from a ‘nice to have’ to a ‘must have’ for global brands, which is illustrated by their increasingly competitive marketplace,” said David Karnstedt, President and CEO, Efficient Frontier. “We believe that Facebook CPCs will continue to rise at a double-digit pace for the remainder of the year, so brands would be wise to add social media marketing to their overall digital marketing spend sooner rather than later.”

Additional Report Highlights

Facebook comments have a viral effect

An analysis of 10 million fans managed by Context Optional demonstrated that for every brand post, there was an average of 100 comments in response. However, brands with more fans received additional interactions. For every 17,000 additional fans generated, the brand received one more comment per post. This demonstrated that there is a viral effect to having more fans as this creates more direct responses (from existing fans) and also indirect responses (from friends of fans).

Facebook spend mostly incremental

Facebook constitutes approximately 5% of search budgets, though for some advertisers this can peak at 25% during time-sensitive, offer-led promotions. In the entertainment category there are some large advertisers who solely advertise on Facebook. This hints that there are new advertising budgets from the gaming and dating sectors going to Facebook, which would not have gone into Search otherwise.

Bing/Yahoo! gained 3.4% points of spend share from Google since Q4

Bing’s continued focus on higher quality and higher monetized traffic is paying off. Last quarter it was noted that the ROI on Bing/Yahoo! was better than Google. Bid management technology such as that used by Efficient Frontier has enabled advertisers to take advantage of that by moving budgets as appropriate. However, in international markets where the search alliance has not yet been implemented, Google’s dominance continues unabated, with the exception of Japan.

Broad-based search is up across most sectors

Retail: Spend was up 9% YoY, with 3% attributable to CPC increases.
Finance: Spend was up 22% YoY partially from CPC increase and partially from click volume increase.
Auto: Spend was down 2% YoY despite CPCs increasing 6%.

International SEM Analysis

United Kingdom

In the United Kingdom, spend grew 7% YoY, reflecting advertisers’ confidence in the continued expansion of e-commerce. ROI fell slightly by 3% compared to last year but remains steady quarter-on-quarter. A more detailed look in the Q2 2011 data shows that the ROI was the highest in April in this quarter, being 3-4% higher than the other two months, corresponding to the Easter holiday season and the warm weather.

France, Germany, Australia, Japan

In France, Google has gained 1% market share from Bing and Yahoo! from the previous quarter. In Germany, Yahoo! is losing out to Google, down from 6.4% in Q1 2011 to 5.1% this quarter. This is also a significant quarter in Australia, where Google broke through the 92% share with an increase of almost 3%. However, their click share was only 90.6% and Yahoo!’s click share was 9.4%, making the cost efficiency on Yahoo! much greater than on Google. The Google/Yahoo! share trend has been the opposite in Japan, where Yahoo! gained an almost 4% share from Google in the last quarter.

Outlook for 2011

Facebook CPCs will continue to rise at double-digit pace

Even if CPCs increase at 20% per quarter for the remainder of the year, this will still result in an 80% growth in a year. This could reasonably equate to a doubling of Facebook’s revenue from marketplace ads. Also, with marketplace ad CPCs increasing and already-active brands exploiting the channel, advertisers should immediately focus their efforts on acquiring new Facebook fans, as well as exploiting new ad formats such as Sponsored Stories to find further efficiencies.

Advertisers will increase understanding of Facebook channel

Continued testing and investment in Facebook will see advertisers evaluate and likely increase their spend. Looking ahead, Efficient Frontier believes that advertising dollars will shift from offline media to search, Facebook and display. While we believe all online advertising channels will continue to grow, the Facebook channel will show the strongest growth in the months ahead.

Bing/Yahoo! will benefit if ROI improvements continue

The search marketplace is largely rational, so advertisers will move money towards Bing/Yahoo! to take advantage of ROI improvements. If the Search Alliance renews integration in international markets next year, non-U.S. advertisers should make the same budgeting decisions.

To download a copy of the full report, go to: http://www.efrontier.com/sites/default/files/EFCO_Q2GlobalReport_Final.pdf.

Research Methodology

This analysis was completed based on data from Efficient Frontier search engine marketing customers and the resulting Efficient Frontier’s Customer Index. The Efficient Frontier Customer Index represents a subset of Efficient Frontier clients who have spend data for six consecutive quarters or more whose resulting SEM metrics are then normalized to average industry category contributions established by multiple third-party data providers. The Efficient Frontier Customer Index consists of a fixed sample of large scale U.S. search engine advertisers across multiple sectors, including finance, travel, retail and automotive. The Efficient Frontier Customer Index sheds light on trends in search engine spending and performance on a year-over-year (YoY) and quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) basis.

Our analysis of Facebook performance was based on data from both the Efficient Frontier and Context Optional platforms. A client index representing more than 15 advertisers and 20 million fans from a multitude of verticals including retail, entertainment, CPG and Finance was built from a subset of advertisers, brands and fans managed through the platforms. Advertiser and user behavior was then analyzed for three quarters beginning Q4 2010.

About Efficient Frontier and Context Optional

Efficient Frontier is a leader in online digital marketing, managing search marketing, display and social media campaigns for advertisers and agencies around the world. Efficient Frontier currently manages more than $1 billion in annual digital marketing spend on behalf of its clients globally.

In May 2011, Efficient Frontier acquired Context Optional, the leading provider of social marketing management solutions for global brands on the leading social networks, including Facebook and Twitter. Context Optional’s Social Marketing Suite enables global enterprises to build, manage and measure their brand presence, and engage their fans to increase mindshare, word of mouth, customer loyalty and website traffic. Together, Efficient Frontier and Context Optional offer a complete solution for brands to acquire, activate and drive value from fans on Facebook and Twitter.

Efficient Frontier is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with offices in New York, Chicago, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and India, and technology licensing partnerships in Japan, Hong Kong and Australia. Context Optional is headquartered in San Francisco. Efficient Frontier is a privately held company with funding from Redpoint Ventures and Cambrian Ventures. For more information on Efficient Frontier, visit http://www.efrontier.com and for Context Optional visit http://www.contextoptional.com.

Facebook Credits will become the mandatory payment method for third party app developers on the social network this July, positioning the virtual currency for explosive growth. This growth will likely be driven in great part by daily active players of social games, who now comprise well over 150 million users. SocialTimes Pro talked with several leaders in this space to review their Facebook Credit deployment strategies in the run-up to the July changeover, summarize their concerns and forecasts, and synthesize their advice on monetizing social games in this new era of Facebook Credits-driven gaming.

SocialTimes Pro also released a report on monetizing Facebook games and apps with Facebook Ad Networks. SocialTimes Pro dug into Facebook’s list of nearly 70 approved ad providers from the developer’s perspective to answer these questions: With all the options, how does a developer choose which networks to work with? Should a developer give up control over its entire inventory or try to sell some traffic directly? Does geography matter? What about the different monetization options; for example, is cost per engagement (CPE) inherently better than CPM?

SocialTimes Pro offers two monthly reports on topics related to Facebook, Virtual Goods, and Social Gaming. SocialTimes Pro is associated with Mediabistro’s AllFacebook.com and SocialTimes.com. For more information, visit www.socialtimespro.com.

About WebMediaBrands Inc.

WebMediaBrands Inc. (Nasdaq: WEBM) (http://www.webmediabrands.com), headquartered in New York, NY, is a leading Internet media company that provides content, education, and career services to media and creative professionals through a portfolio of vertical online properties, communities, and trade shows. The Company’s online business includes: (i) mediabistro.com, a leading blog network providing content, education, community, and career resources (including the industry’s leading online job board) about major media industry verticals including new media, social media, Facebook, TV news, sports news, advertising, public relations, publishing, design, mobile, and the Semantic Web; (ii) InsideNetwork.com, a leading network of online properties dedicated to providing original market research, data services, news, events, and job listings on the Facebook platform, social gaming, and mobile applications ecosystems; and (iii) AllCreativeWorld.com, a leading network of online properties providing content, education, community, career, and other resources for creative and design professionals. The Company’s online business also includes community, membership and e-commerce offerings including a freelance listing service, a marketplace for designing and purchasing logos and premium membership services. The Company’s trade show and educational offerings include conferences, online and in-person courses, and video subscription libraries on topics covered by the Company’s online business.

McLean, Va. – Clearspring, provider of the largest online content sharing platform AddThis, announced its AddThis platform now enables publishers to analyze all content sharing activity in real-time through an easy-to-use online dashboard. AddThis analytics provides the first complete view of content sharing that, in addition to all sharing through the AddThis platform, now includes all content shared by users copying and pasting links from the address bar of a browser. With new real-time insights about all the ways users share content, publishers have a single dashboard from which they can measure the impact of sharing and referral traffic from social sites.

“AddThis is now the only sharing platform to enable a publisher to track all sharing activity, but also to do it real-time. For the first time, web sites can monitor all sharing activity coming from their site—including copy and pasted links—from a single dashboard and can more easily leverage this data to optimize their sites,” Hooman Radfar, founder and CEO of Clearspring. “Unlike with SEO, social media optimization happens in real-time. It’s not about days, or weeks; it’s about minutes and seconds. When social groundswell occurs, publishers will be able to jump on it—live.”

The new AddThis Live View shows all shares and clicks as they happen, grouping them by content, and automatically promoting the most active URLs to the top of the feed. Publishers can use this information to modify site layouts, editorial and content marketing tactics in response to continuous feedback about viewers’ activities. This makes it easier for publishers to accurately understand traffic-generating content without switching between different application dashboards.

“With real-time analytics, we can see immediately which articles resonated with our readers—so much so that they chose to share that content with their friends and followers,” said Michelle Kessler, social media editor for USA TODAY. “We hope to use this valuable information to respond quickly with content promotion, related content or potential follow-up stories.”

AddThis also provides data on sharing occurring via the browser address bar. When publishers opt-in to use this new feature, every page served up is assigned a unique URL that shows publishers who among their audience has copied and pasted a link to a piece of content to share it with their network. This lets them more accurately understand reader behavior—especially those who are using email or third-party applications to share—and anonymously identify certain users as key influencers.

If you’d like to learn more about AddThis analytics, please visit the AddThis analytics page or login into your account here: https://www.addthis.com/login. You can also check out the product video here: http://youtu.be/nM7YsOSj7dM.

About Clearspring Technologies

Clearspring is the leader in connecting publishers, services and advertisers to audiences on the social web. Clearspring’s AddThis platform enables leading publishers to distribute and track digital content such as web pages, widgets, and videos to social networks, bookmarking sites, blogs, and more. AddThis is used by over 9 million unique domains reaching over 1 billion unique users monthly. Clearspring’s Audience Platform leverages aggregate data from AddThis to allow advertisers and publishers to reach these audiences by influence, interest and intent in real-time. Visit www.clearspring.com to learn more.

WASHINGTON – SocialCode, a full-service Facebook agency and subsidiary of The Washington Post Company, announced results from a new Republican political message study conducted on Facebook. The study was designed to demonstrate how the world’s largest social networking platform, when used correctly, can be a powerful research tool for politicians and brands.

“We believe this message test shows just how effective Facebook is as both an advertising and research platform for brands and politicians,” said Laura O’Shaughnessy, General Manager at SocialCode. “Campaigns like this on Facebook give advertisers powerful insights into specific audiences and messages and allow advertisers to quickly understand what is resonating with a targeted group.”

SocialCode conducted a randomized campaign among Facebook users in Iowa and New Hampshire to gauge the power of specific messages for seven potential contenders for the Republican presidential nomination. Between May 23 and June 4, Facebook users in these critical early voting states were asked to show support by clicking “Like” in response to randomly displayed image combinations of seven declared or prospective candidates (or a GOP elephant) with five common Republican messages.

TOP FINDINGS INCLUDE:

- On every message former Alaska governor Sarah Palin received the highest “Like” rate in both New Hampshire and Iowa;
- “Values” rank fourth of the five-item message list across candidates, but it’s a major driver for Palin, who remains a shadow candidate. For Palin, the 2008 GOP vice-presidential nominee, the values-oriented message performs significantly better than does a focus on the economy;
- Palin is the only one of the seven potential candidates where economic messaging scores last;
-Across candidates the most resonant GOP message is to tack against the president: of five common GOP themes for winning back the White House in 2012, a straight-ahead anti-Obama message tested best;
- While President Obama’s re-election hopes may hinge on the fate of the nation’s struggling economy, from a pure policy standpoint it is the president’s health care overhaul that generates the sharpest opposition in this online message test;
- While some GOP strategists see Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health plan as his Achilles’ heel in the nomination fight, an “anti-ObamaCare” message performs nearly as well for the former governor as does an economic one, the one he’s made the centerpiece of this bid for the GOP nod;
- Romney and health care combination performed better online than did a combination of health care and former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty.

Rank order of 2012 GOP messages (by “Like” rate)Message

By State – in Iowa, the health care message rivals the basic anti-Obama meme, but in New Hampshire, the health care message fails to resonate as clearly;
By Age – the economy is a stronger message for younger adults in Iowa and New Hampshire than it is for those aged 30 and up. Across the two states, it’s particularly important for those aged 25 to 29. Values-based and national security messages are the lowest performers across all age groups;
By Gender – the anti-Obama message resonates far better with men than it does with women.
“If the 2008 campaign proved one thing, it’s that social media works when it comes to reaching voters who are researching issues online, reading blogs and debating issues with friends on Facebook,” continued O’Shaughnessy. “SocialCode’s methodology is focused on getting the exact right ads in front of users, allowing politicians and brands to tailor messages to maximize positive response among different segments of the population.”

About SocialCode

SocialCode, a subsidiary of the Washington Post Company, is a full-service Facebook agency. SocialCode’s unique tools are built on a research engine that offers analytics and information for advertisers that far surpasses what they could get anywhere else. With advanced quantitative methods, SocialCode specializes in building targeted communities, engaging those audiences and monetizing potential customers all while conducting research to inform strategy.

NEW YORK  – Online advertising saw strong spend growth in the second quarter, according to a report released by IgnitionOne, a leading provider of performance marketing technology and services, managing more than $1 billion in online advertising for some of the world’s largest brands and their agencies, including Chico’s, Ann Taylor, La Quinta and more.

The second quarter saw year-over-year spend growth increases across all three major online media channels (Paid Search, Display and Facebook), despite continuing uncertainties from the economy and higher gasoline prices. US paid search spend grew a steady 12% year-over-year and Facebook advertising was particularly strong, up 22% on a same-client-basis and up 280% across all advertisers. However, paid search declined in June, painting an uncertain picture for the third quarter.

Key findings in the report:

Paid search advertising sees steady growth YOY, but dips in June US paid search spend grew a steady 12% year-over-year in Q2, and was flat compared with Q1 growth. The quarter began strong, but dipped in June to nearly flat growth on a YOY basis.

Google commands majority of market share in search, display
Google was again the standout performer showing gains in YOY search spend and significant market share traction for its AdEx display platform. Google grew to 81% share of all US search advertising spend and 51% share of US RTB display spend in Q2.

Facebook sees dramatic growth from new advertisers
Facebook advertising spend is up 22% YOY on a same-client-basis. However, Facebook has experienced high rates of growth from new marketer adoption in the past year, contributing a 280% increase in advertising spend across all clients. Spending patterns within an advertiser’s campaign lifecycle show marked growth declines after the first few months, suggesting advertisers are still in a “test and learn” phase with the new and immature ad platform.

“Overall it was a very good quarter for online advertising, but it wasn’t a slam dunk,” said Roger Barnette, President of IgnitionOne. “The paid search spending slowdown in June did not have a significant impact on the quarter overall, although it could be an indicator of future months’ performance, and we’re cautiously optimistic heading into Q3.”

IgnitionOne’s complete Q2 report can be downloaded here.

This report is the latest in a series of reports from IgnitionOne reviewing trends across the online advertising landscape. Previous quarterly reports can be downloaded at http://bit.ly/ignitiononeresearch.

The ‘Mashable Global Ads Chart’, hosted on the Viral Video Chart, ranks branded content based on the number of times a video has been shared on Facebook, Twitter and the blogosphere.

It means readers of Mashable.com – the top source for news in social and digital media, technology and web culture – can regularly catch up with the hottest branded videos online.

The chart breaks down the number of shares by platform, allowing brands and agencies to see exactly where on the social web their content is gaining traction.

Unruly Media’s COO Sarah Wood said: “Mashable is right at the forefront of the social and digital community and the ‘Mashable Global Ads Chart’ recognises in real time the very best in branded social videos. Because the ads are ranked by shares rather than views, the chart delivers genuine insight into which videos are taking the social web by storm.

“The Viral Video Chart tracks up to 18 million video shares every day. Over the last 12 months we have seen a 130% increase in the sharing of branded video content, which shows how brands are harnessing the emotional power of video to build long-term relationships with consumers.

“With the explosion in video sharing, it’s more important than ever before for brands to track the success of their content on the social web.”

About Unruly Media

Unruly Media is a global platform for social video advertising, working with global agencies and brands to get their video content watched and shared across the social web.

With a global reach of 725 million monthly users, Unruly has bought, earned and audited more than a billion views and generated over 100 million shares across 1,200+ social video campaigns.

About Mashable

Founded in 2005, Mashable is the top source for news in social and digital media, technology and web culture.

With more than 40 million monthly page views, Mashable is the most prolific news site reporting breaking web news, providing analysis of trends, reviewing new websites and services, and offering social media resources and guides.

SAN FRANCISCO – Marin Software, provider the leading online advertising management platform for advertisers and agencies, announced that Path Interactive, a leading full-service internet advertising firm has seen significant improvements in client performance as well as time savings with Marin’s powerful and easy to use Facebook advertising management platform.

News Facts:

- Advertising on Facebook is an important part of the online media mix for Path Interactive clients and many of their advertisers have increased social media marketing budgets in 2011. As client teams began spending an increasing amount of time managing and optimizing PPC ads on Facebook, Path Interactive turned to the Marin Software platform to make their process more efficient and effective.

- Marin Software’s powerful analysis and optimization solution for Facebook ads, fully integrated with paid search management, has addressed Path Interactive’s workflow needs, allowing them to better manage Facebook ads in the context of each client’s online advertising portfolio.

- With Marin Software optimizing spend according to ad-performance by audience segment, Path Interactive was able to meet client’s Facebook “fan” goals much more efficiently. For example, with one large retail client, using Marin’s automated bid optimization and creative rotation decreased the average cost-per-like by over 30%. For another client, automating the creative refresh process enabled the agency to rotate ads as soon as performance dropped, improving average click-through-rates by up to 35%.

- Path Interactive has also seen impressive time savings by leveraging Marin Software to manage Facebook Ads. Using Marin Creative Rotation has saved Path Interactive hours that were once spent changing creative when click-through rates for ads began to drop. Plus, Marin’s automated alerting and reporting solutions have cut the amount of time spent building client reports by over 20%.

About Path Interactive:

Path Interactive is a leading search engine marketing & full-service Internet advertising firm providing results oriented ad campaigns for national, regional & local business clients. Path services include Paid Search Advertising, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing & Web Development. Specialties include: Digital Marketing, Advertising, Search Engine Marketing, Pay Per Click, SEO, Social Media Marketing.

About Marin Software:

Marin Software is a leading provider of online advertising management solutions, offering an integrated platform for managing search, display, and social marketing. The company provides solutions for advertisers and agencies of all sizes, enabling them to improve financial performance, save time, and make better decisions. Marin Enterprise, the company’s flagship product, addresses the needs of online marketers spending at least $100,000 per month on biddable media. Marin Professional delivers the same power and ease of use as Marin Enterprise, through an application designed for marketers spending less than $100,000 per month on paid search. Headquartered in San Francisco, with offices worldwide, Marin’s technology powers marketing campaigns for over 800 customers managing more than $2 billion of annualized ad spend in more than 160 countries. For more information, please visit: http://www.marinsoftware.com.

INDIANAPOLIS – Global interactive marketing provider ExactTarget launched a new guide that offers practical advice on how to transform consumer research into effective marketing campaigns across email, Facebook and Twitter.

Entitled Top 5 Things Consumers Want from Marketers, the guide pairs findings from ExactTarget’s consumer research with clear step-by-step advice on how to create engaging interactive marketing campaigns that deliver on consumers’ expectations and drive new business.

“Consumers’ expectations of brands have never been higher,” said Tim Kopp, ExactTarget chief marketing officer. “Our new guide brings together the best of our research with real-world ‘how-to’ recommendations designed to help marketers create powerful interactive marketing campaigns that build brand loyalty and increase customer lifetime value.”

Featuring insights from ExactTarget’s consumer research, including its acclaimed Subscribers, Fans and Followers series, the new guide includes practical advice on how to:

- Expand an email marketing program to include Twitter and Facebook;
- Coordinate interactions across all online channels to create a seamless customer experience;
- Allow customers to select the best channel and frequency for brand interaction; and
- Optimize campaigns to increase engagement and overall performance.

“As consumers continue to evolve into digital media multitaskers, the rules of marketing will be irreversibly changed,” states the Nov. 2010 report by Forrester Research Inc. entitled “CMO Mandate: Adapt or Perish”. “In this new world, there is greater demand to consume media across multiple platforms, causing exponential growth of content — both branded and user-generated — but unfortunately consumers will become more difficult to engage.”

The Top 5 Things Consumers Want from Marketers briefing is available for free download at www.ExactTarget.com/ConsumersWant.

The launch of the new guide follows news that ExactTarget’s next generation of interactive marketing technology – the Interactive Marketing HubTM – has been named the “Innovation of the Year.” Awarded by technology trade association TechPoint, the honor recognized the Interactive Marketing Hub’s unique strength and ability to enable marketers to plan, monitor and track real-time interactive marketing programs from a single dashboard. By aggregating all customer interaction data as it happens, the Interactive Marketing Hub allows marketers to instantly take action on data across all online channels in real time.

About ExactTarget

ExactTarget is a leading global provider of on-demand email marketing and interactive marketing solutions. The company’s Interactive Marketing Hub technology provides organizations a single solution to connect with customers via email, integrated text messaging, landing pages and social media. Supported by collaborative global services teams, ExactTarget’s technology integrates with more sales and marketing information systems than any other in the industry, including Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Omniture and Webtrends among many others. ExactTarget powers permission-based multichannel communications for thousands of organizations around the world including Expedia.com, Best Buy, Papa John’s, CareerBuilder.com, Gannett Co., Inc., The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, The Home Depot and Wellpoint, Inc. For more information, visit www.exacttarget.com.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network with more than 100 million members worldwide, announced several additions to its global advertising sales organization. The personnel moves, which include the addition of several new roles at the company, will better position the company’s Marketing Solutions team to meet the broad marketing and advertising goals of the world’s leading BtoB and “prosumer” brands. The changes announced are as follows:

- Clive Punter will lead the organization as the Global Managing Director of Marketing Solutions, based in London. Clive will focus on global strategy and growth initiatives for Marketing Solutions and will report to Mike Gamson, Senior Vice President, Global Sales at LinkedIn. Clive joined LinkedIn in September 2010 after nearly 15 years at CBS Outdoor. He served as Director of International Sales and COO of Europe and Asia before being appointed International CEO of CBS Outdoor in 2007.

- Jonathan Lister will serve as Vice President, North America Sales for Marketing Solutions. Jonathan joined LinkedIn last July as Country Manager in Canada, and quickly became Managing Director for Canada and Latin America. In that position, he was responsible for driving revenue, building user engagement, strategic partnerships, marketing and general operations. Jonathan will now take on the lead field sales role for all of North America. Prior to LinkedIn, Jonathan was Country Manager at Google Canada, responsible for creating and executing the business strategy for Google Canada, and he held several executive positions at AOL.

- Emily Ketchen joins LinkedIn as Director, Global Agency Relations. She will be responsible for the relationships with all major advertising and marketing agencies around the world. This is a new position at LinkedIn, and reflects the growing demand from larger advertisers who plan and buy through agencies. Emily comes to LinkedIn from McCann Worldgroup San Francisco, where she was a senior vice president and group account director.

- Josh Graff recently joined LinkedIn as Sales Director for EMEA. In this role, he is responsible for growing the Marketing Solutions business across the region. Before joining LinkedIn, Joshua ran EMEA/APAC media sales and business development at Electronics Arts, overseeing EA’s media sales relationships with sport’s leagues including the NFL, NBA and NHL and securing key partnerships with European brands including Renault, Vodafone and Adidas.

- Alison Engel joins LinkedIn as the Director of Field Marketing for Marketing Solutions. Alison comes to LinkedIn from Microsoft, where she was the Marketing Director supporting their advertising business. Prior to that, she held senior roles at Massive Inc., HBO, Goldman Sachs and CBS Television.

- Steve Patrizi will be leaving LinkedIn after three and a half years to pursue the next step in his career. Formerly the Vice President of Marketing Solutions, Steve has played an important role in building the Marketing Solutions business and bringing it to where it is today.

“Every day, more marketers and advertisers are recognizing that there is no better online platform to reach the most influential, affluent and highly-educated audience than LinkedIn,” said Gamson. “Now is the time for us to take the Marketing Solutions business to the next level, and to do that, we’re bringing on some of the most experienced and talented people in the industry – from big agencies and big brands – while giving current LinkedIn talent more responsibility. These moves poise LinkedIn Marketing Solutions – one of the primary revenue drivers for the company – for accelerated growth.”

LinkedIn Marketing Solutions helps marketers and advertisers reach and engage with exactly the right audiences on LinkedIn through a suite of self-serve products and custom enterprise solutions. LinkedIn has more than 33,000 Marketing Solutions customers taking advantage of a broad suite of products and services, from highly-targeted display ads to uniquely LinkedIn offerings, such as Company Pages and Custom Groups. In the last year, Marketing Solutions revenue grew more than 94 percent to nearly $27.7 million in the first quarter of 2011. Learn more at: http://marketing.linkedin.com.

About LinkedIn

LinkedIn operates the world’s largest professional network on the Internet with more than 100 million members in over 200 countries and territories. The LinkedIn website launched in 2003 and currently counts executives from all Fortune 500 companies as members. The company is privately-held and has a diversified business model with revenues coming from user subscriptions, advertising sales and hiring solutions. LinkedIn is headquartered in Mountain View, California.

RESTON, VA – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, released an overview of the U.S. online display advertising market for Q1 2011 based on data from comScore Ad Metrix, indicating that nearly 1.11 trillion display ads were delivered to U.S. Internet users during the quarter. Facebook accounted for 346 billion impressions, nearly double the number it delivered in Q1 2010, and accounting for nearly one third of all display ad impressions delivered.

“The U.S. online display advertising market maintained its strong momentum from last year with a terrific first quarter,” said Jeff Hackett, comScore executive vice president. “We are now seeing more than one trillion display ads delivered every single quarter and nearly 300 individual advertisers spending at least $1 million a quarter on display, numbers which underscore just how large and vibrant the online medium has become. And it’s not just about the volume but about the quality of the advertising experience that can be delivered as we see continued investment in compelling, high-quality creative that helps cultivate long-term brand equity.”

Facebook Ranks as Top Display Ad Publisher in Q1 2011

Popular social networking site Facebook.com led all online publishers in Q1 2011 with 346 billion display ad impressions, representing 31.2 percent market share. Facebook’s market share has increased 15 percentage points from 16.2 percent in Q1 2010. Yahoo! Sites ranked second during the most recent quarter with 112 billion impressions (10.1 percent), followed by Microsoft Sites with 54 billion impressions (4.8 percent) and AOL, Inc. with 33 billion impressions (3.0 percent).

*Display ads include static and rich media ads; excludes video ads, house ads and
very small ads (< 2,500 pixels in dimension)

AT&T Ranks as Top Display Advertiser in Q1 2011

AT&T ranked as the top online display advertiser in the first quarter with 19.5 billion impressions, accounting for 1.8 percent of display ads. Experian Interactive ranked second with 16.6 billion impressions (1.5 percent), followed by Scottrade ranked third with 11.2 billion (1.0 percent) and Intuit with 11 billion (1.0 percent). Groupon entered the top ten display advertisers at #7 with 7.7 billion impressions (0.7 percent).

Additional findings from Q1 2011 include:

- The top advertisers in Q1 by estimated share of online display ad spending were: AT&T (2.1 percent), Experian (1.9 percent), Scottrade (1.6 percent), Toyota (1.2 percent), and Netflix (1.1 percent). Rounding out the top ten were Intuit, Verizon, Progressive, Sprint Nextel and ING, each with 1.0 percent.
- The top consumer goods advertisers ranked by display ad spending were: Procter & Gamble, Mars, Kellogg’s, General Mills and Kraft Foods
- 95 different advertisers delivered at least 1 billion display ad impressions and 293 advertisers spent at least $1 million on display ads during the quarter.

About comScore
comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world and preferred source of digital marketing intelligence. For more information, please visit www.comscore.com/companyinfo.

TrackSimple, a BlueKai Analytics offering, has launched a new feature to its existing media dashboard that allows users to aggregate campaign data from top media partners.  In less than 24 hours, users  can view and analyze campaign data from media channels including DoubleClick, Google Adwords, Facebook, MSN and Google Analytics.  Designed for agencies and marketers, TrackSimple consolidates digital campaign data from any channel to provide media performance visibility and analytics in one dashboard.  With all campaign data in one interface, users can slice, dice and analyze which campaigns are performing across different media channels and where to spend dollars to reach more qualified audiences.

“People are consuming media all over the Internet and marketers and their agencies are chasing those eyeballs with digital campaigns across increasing channels.  At the end of every campaign, agencies are tasked with consolidating all campaign performance into a digestible format for their clients. ” said Jon Ingalls, Founder of TrackSimple.  “We’ve simplified the way this integral data is gathered, consumed and shared.  Rather than manually compiling and building complicated spreadsheets, our solution pulls campaign data directly from the source; then let’s you slice and dice to figure out which audience and which media source is giving you the best bang for your dollars.”

Simply by entering login and password information into the TrackSimple secure dashboard solution, users gain a holistic view of their campaign data from vendors including DoubleClick, Google Adwords, Facebook, MSN and Google Analytics.  Agencies and marketers can also add additional campaign data sources from nearly any other source including custom in-house data-sources within a few days.

TrackSimple’s campaign dashboard marks the continuation of a trend that is rapidly gaining the attention of Madison Avenue and the idea in how advertising agencies are empowering themselves with technology to become more efficient and cost-effective.

In addition, BlueKai Analytics also offers a robust pre-campaign audience intelligence solution that provides new audience discovery and campaign targeting recommendations for agencies before a dollar is spent.  Once a campaign is implemented, BlueKai Analytics can also provide data profiles on audiences and metrics that can be used for future prospecting.

WAKEFIELD, Mass. – SEMPO announced results of its 2011 State of Search Marketing Report. With over 900 companies and agencies participating in the global online survey conducted by Econsultancy, the report estimates that the North American search marketing industry will grow by 16% in 2011 to a value of $19.3B, up from $16.6B in 2010.

A significant percentage of companies are now using Facebook. Just under half of respondents say they use Facebook for pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns – 47% in North America and 45% outside the US and Canada. The rising popularity of Facebook is even more apparent within agencies. Nearly three quarters of North American agencies (74%) and two thirds of those outside the U.S. and Canada (69%) say their clients use Facebook.

The rise of the mobile internet is the trend which is having the most impact on search marketing, according to the survey. Local search is the next most significant trend, yet primarily from the perspective of agencies. Respondents also indicated the growing importance of behavioral targeting. The number of companies doing SEO, paid search and social media in-house, has decreased, with more marketers seeking help from service providers.

“The healthy growth reported for the industry in 2011—surpassing the 14% growth in 2010—is gratifying,” commented SEMPO president Chris Boggs. “The industry is evolving to encompass much more than the search engines. The increasing role of social media is re-shaping the industry in surprising ways.”

Other top findings include:

Mobile internet

* 40% of company respondents said that the growth of the mobile internet was “highly significant”, an increase from 26% last year. A further 39% said it was “significant”.
* Agencies are feeling the impact of the mobile internet even more strongly, with almost half of supply-side respondents (47%) describing its impact as highly significant.

Local search

* The next most important trend is local search, according to agencies. Forty-three percent (43%) of supply-side respondents said this was highly significant. A further 41% say that it is significant. According to agencies, 34% of client search budget is spent on local PPC advertising (i.e. at a regional, city or sub-market level).
* Client-side advertisers are not yet affected by local search as much as their agency counterparts. Only 26% of company respondents say that the impact of local search has been highly significant. Local, on average, represents just under a quarter (23%) of client-side search budget, which is significantly less than the agency average (34% of client budget).

Use of social networks, including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn

* Beyond PPC, the percentage of companies using Facebook more broadly for promoting themselves now stands at 84%, up from 73% last year.
* Three quarters of companies (75%) use Twitter to promote their companies or brands, while 52% use business networking site LinkedIn. More than a quarter of North American companies now run PPC campaigns on LinkedIn.

More companies outsourcing SEO, paid search and social media

* Only 44% of companies are now carrying out search engine optimization in-house, compared to 51% last year.
* Only 38% of companies are doing paid search marketing in-house compared to 47% last year.
* Only 55% are doing social media marketing in-house, compared to 62% last year.

Behavioral targeting

* The proportion of company respondents who say that behavioral targeting is highly significant or significant now stands at 78%, up from 68% last year.

This year’s annual SEMPO study – now in its seventh year – is an aggregation of information provided by organizations from 66 different countries, from marketers across a range of business sectors and types of agency.

“Once again the SEMPO survey has collected a rich set of data that provides valuable industry perspective and insights as seen through the eyes and dollar investments of both advertisers and agencies,” said Marc Engelsman, VP Client Programs and Services at Digital Brand Expressions and the lead for this SEMPO initiative. “All marketers, not just search marketers, should want to leverage this information as they look to improve the performance of their digital engagements.”

“A mature industry maintains a balance between today and tomorrow,” said Stefan Tornquist, U.S. Research Director at Econsultancy. “Search engine marketers have learned how to roll with algorithm shifts and price increases and are constantly improving their efficiency. At the same time, they’re taking the time to focus on the emerging opportunities where search, social and mobile meet.”

The report is based on an online survey, conducted in February and March 2011, which SEMPO and Econsultancy promoted to their respective members and to search marketing professionals. A complimentary copy of the report is provided to SEMPO members and those who participated in the survey. A total of 920 total respondents from 66 countries took part, including 325 advertisers and 595 agencies or consultants conducting search marketing on behalf of clients.

To obtain a copy of the SEMPO 2011 State of Search Marketing report, visit: http://econsultancy.com/reports/sempo-state-of-search

About Econsultancy

Econsultancy is a community where the world’s digital marketing and e-commerce professionals meet to sharpen their strategy, source suppliers, get quick answers, compare notes, help each other out and discover how to do everything better online. It was launched in 1999 and since then has grown to a dominant position in the digital marketing industry with more than 100,000 members worldwide. Its website and blog attracts more than 300,000 unique users per month and its range of training courses and conferences are attended by more than 5,000 marketers every year. For more information, visit http://econsultancy.com or follow @econsultancy on Twitter.

About SEMPO

SEMPO is a global non-profit organization serving the search marketing industry and marketing professionals engaged in it. Its purpose is to provide a foundation for industry growth through building stronger relationships, fostering awareness, providing education, promoting the industry, generating research and creating a better understanding of search and its role in marketing. SEMPO includes thousands of professionals across 50 countries. The organization’s mission is to represent the common interests of companies and consultants worldwide and provide them with a voice in the marketplace. SEMPO’s education and outreach initiatives are funded in part by Google, American Express Open SearchManager, and Baidu, and supported through partnerships with SMX, SES, OMS, and MediaPost. For more information or to join the organization, visit http://www.SEMPO.org.

NEW YORK – BLiNQ Media, the leading global technology innovator in Facebook advertising and the only pure-play media and technology company worldwide with official access to the Facebook Ads API, and Havas Digital, the interactive arm of Havas, announced a global partner relationship in which Havas Digital will roll out the BLiNQ Ad Manager (BAM) to its Fortune 500 clients.

Havas Digital will make BLiNQ Media a preferred partner, and will, with the expertise and support of BLiNQ Media, train its global search and social teams to use BAM for Facebook advertising buys, optimization and analytics. BAM helps to improve operational efficiencies and campaign performance by offering a simplified system to deliver advertising in scale through the Facebook advertising API. BLiNQ Media will give Havas Digital access to its own white-label self-service version of BAM, proprietary data store, and Facebook advertising API key, and will help Havas Digital make the most of campaign management via BLiNQ’s managed-services offering. This partnership marks the first time a Facebook technology-based campaign management solution with a dedicated API key and data store has been deployed for an agency on a global basis.

“Our clients want sophisticated solutions and expertise that maximize impact and make the most of the Facebook advertising platform,” said Havas Digital SVP and Global Director of Product Development Rob Griffin. “BLiNQ Media’s BAM technology will enable management, optimization and scalability of complex Facebook ad campaigns for our agencies and clients around the world. Our global licensing agreement with BLiNQ pairs well with our other technology partners to further help our organization deliver data-driven marketing performance and excellence.”

Havas Digital is present in more than 40 countries with more than 400 clients offering expertise in interactive and mobile marketing. The agency encompasses the digital media division of Havas and is one of the top interactive communications consulting companies worldwide.

“Our partnership with Havas is monumental, because Havas is the first agency to use BAM to manage Facebook on such a large scale,” said BLiNQ Media CEO Dave Williams. “By training the Havas global search and social teams in BLiNQ Media’s buying and optimization best practices for Facebook advertising, we will help to set the foundation for process consistency and enhanced performance across all of their client campaigns. Our partnership further establishes Havas as a leader in delivering innovative, high-performance Facebook advertising solutions and results to its clients around the globe.”

This story first appeared in the Wall Street Journal and Inside Facebook.

About BLiNQ Media

BLiNQ Media delivers breakthrough Facebook advertising results for agencies and big brands. The leading global technology innovator in Facebook advertising, BLiNQ Media drives rapid and scalable performance with a powerful combination of a proven approach to campaign management, optimization, engagement and branding insight; and its BLiNQ Ad Manager (BAM) platform. BLiNQ Media has pioneered Social Engagement AdvertisingSM and CPSASM (Cost Per Social ActionSM) optimization for Facebook campaign success. Agencies currently tapping the power of BLiNQ Media and BAM include WPP’s GroupM, Publicis, Omnicom Media Group, Turner Media Group, Havas Digital and 22Squared, among others. BLiNQ Media has its corporate headquarters at TechSpace in New York City’s Union Square and its technology development team headquartered at Georgia Tech’s Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) based in Atlanta. BLiNQ Media and BAM can be found on the Web at www.blinqmedia.com and www.blinqadmanager.com.

LONDON & SAN FRANCISCO – TBG Digital, the leading global marketing and technology company specializing in Facebook and social media advertising campaigns, unveiled two new technology-based innovations designed to give advertisers a competitive edge. SmartPages and Daily Deals draw on the versatility and scope of the ONE Media Manager™ software platform to allow marketers to further refine and tailor their offerings. With the emphasis on personalization and user engagement, the announcement is expected to deliver greater ROI on Facebook advertising campaigns.

With 600 million Facebook users worldwide, new techniques and initiatives are critical if companies are to appeal to individuals and keep them interested and involved in evolving Facebook campaigns. SmartPages and Daily Deals address these issues in different ways.

SmartPages is a multi variant landing page optimisation tool designed specifically for Facebook that helps maximize conversion rates. It allows marketers to build relevant Web pages within the Facebook environment with ease and precision and automatically split tests 15,000 combinations to find the best performing page.
Daily Deals is an application that sits on a custom tab in a client’s Facebook page. It allows brands to run Groupon-like daily offers from their fan page without having to pay the commission to a third-party. It makes for a less intrusive way of promoting a service or product while maintaining the appeal of a time-limited special offer.

Both approaches blend with the informal, social nature associated with Facebook and importantly do not require users to leave the site. This drives a greater return on investment on the Facebook advertising campaign as individuals are more willing to engage and respond to an ad that does not direct them elsewhere or place additional obstacles in their way.

“The unique nature of Facebook and social networking generally lends itself to constant innovation and evolution. Holding the attention of an individual for a period of time requires a methodological approach, creativity and insight. It also requires advertisers to think ahead and invest in new techniques and approaches. SmartPages and Daily Deals gives marketers a competitive edge by not just reaching an audience, but drawing in an individual so that they interact and respond to the advert based on very detailed testing and analysis. Deploying technology-orientated tools such as SmartPages and Daily Deals can drive greater revenue and deliver a more engaging, constructive dialogue with Facebook audiences,” said Simon Mansell, CEO, TBG Digital.

“Effective Facebook advertising is grounded in tailored campaigns that build on personal preferences and individual tastes. Technology continues to play a central role in delivering highly effective campaigns. The scope and flexibility of ONE Media Manager provides a robust advertising platform that can be built on with innovations such as SmartPages and Daily Deals to address specific issues associated with Facebook advertising,” added Simon Mansell, CEO, TBG Digital.

About TBG Digital

TBG Digital is a global marketing and technology company, specialising in Facebook advertising and social media marketing. Combining technology with unparalleled experience, the company collaborates with clients to meet their marketing objectives. Founded in 2001, TBG Digital has offices in London and San Francisco and manages campaigns for more than 90 advertisers targeting in 40+ countries. For more information, please visit our website at www.tbgdigital.com.

SUNNYVALE, Calif. – The first quarter of 2011 started off strong in the U.S. for digital marketing, with search engine marketing growing by 17% Year on Year (YoY) due primarily to solid increases in the retail and finance categories. Facebook advertising is also getting more competitive, with Cost Per Clicks (CPCs) increasing by 40% Quarter on Quarter (QoQ). Display advertising also showed positive signs with a 300% increase in exchange ad inventory and a 30% Cost Per Thousand (CPM) decline, indicating greater gains in reach and efficiency within the ad exchanges.

This is according to Efficient Frontier, a leading performance marketing company managing more than $1 billion in marketing spend annually on behalf of advertisers worldwide. This data and specific industry trends were released in the company’s Q1 2011 Digital Marketing Performance Report.

“The strong showing for digital marketing in the first quarter of 2011 was in line with our prediction of a 15% to 20% increase in spend in 2011,” said David Karnstedt, President and CEO, Efficient Frontier. “We’re also seeing great demand for Facebook’s ad products as the social networking giant’s ad offerings continue to evolve. This is all solid evidence of an economic recovery, and that marketers are seeing tremendous results when they intelligently allocate their marketing spend and optimize across channels.”

Report Highlights

Digital marketing continues to show strength in the first quarter of 2011. While search marketing decelerated as expected off of a big Q4 2010, YoY growth remains robust at 17%. Advertiser demand for Facebook’s ad products increased significantly with spend rising sharply on 40% QoQ CPC growth. The display ad exchanges also rapidly expanded with Efficient Frontier’s advertisers accessing more than 300% more inventory than a year ago at 30% lower Cost Per Thousand (CPMs). This means that display advertisers are gaining both reach and efficiency as new technologies like Real Time Bidding (RTB) become more prevalent.

Broad-Based Search Growth Across Nearly All Sectors

The retail sector was the big winner this past quarter, as retail impressions grew by 30% YoY, showing higher consumer interest in retail products. The Finance sector also fared well, growing at 18% YoY. The travel sector was the only sector that saw a decline in spend as CPCs remained flat.

Retail: Spend was up 22% YoY on increased consumer demand
Travel: Spend is down 13% YoY as CPCs are flat
Finance: Spend was up 18% YoY on CTR gains
Auto: Spend was up 10% YoY on CPC gains as well as increased in consumer demand
Bing-Yahoo! ROI Increase

Google continues to have the majority of overall market share in SEM spend and clicks post the Bing-Yahoo! integration. However, Bing’s ROI is currently higher than Google’s ROI. Bing’s ROI has increased 10% YoY while Google’s ROI has decreased by 12% YoY. While the revenue per click (RPC) on Bing is 12% lower than Google, the CPCs on Bing are also lower than the CPCs on Google, which is driving Bing’s higher ROI.

Facebook Becomes More Competitive

Efficient Frontier saw tremendous momentum in Facebook advertising throughout the last several quarters. Advertisers are eager to take advantage of the full capabilities in the Facebook Marketplace to engage with their fans and promote their brands. Because of this, spend on Facebook is growing. Our analysis shows CPCs have grown by 44% QoQ, indicating that Facebook is becoming more competitive as advertisers realize its tremendous value.

International SEM Analysis

United Kingdom

In the United Kingdom, spend grew 9% YoY, reflecting increased confidence in consumer consumption power. ROI in the U.K. increased by 6% YoY. Google dominates the SEM market with a 91% market share. Unlike the U.S., where the travel industry has declined, the overall demand for travel has increased in the U.K., with spend in the travel sector growing by 8% YoY due to impressions and click growth. ROI in travel has increased 14% YoY, indicating strong consumer buying intentions.

France, Germany, Australia

SEM market share is dominated by Google in France, Germany, and Australia with approximately 93% of the market. Yahoo! comes in second place in Germany and Australia while in France, Bing has a larger market share than Yahoo!.

Japan

Unlike the U.S. and Europe, Japan’s SEM market is more evenly divided between Google and Yahoo!, with Google taking a slight edge at 53% market share. Amidst the horrific crisis in Japan, SEM spend has grown by 13% YoY. The growth is due to a CPC increase of 7% YoY as well as click volume increase of 5% YoY.

Outlook for 2011

SEM Growth Continues

Efficient Frontier continues to be optimistic about SEM growth. Our prediction is that search will continue to grow 15% this year in the U.S. due to the strength in the finance and retail sectors. Our prediction for the U.K. is that search will continue to grow at 10%.

Bing-Yahoo! Market Share Increase

As Bing expands its network, it is likely that the traffic quality will drop. Having a 12% higher ROI puts Bing in a good position to expand its network while giving it a significant margin of error. The higher return on Bing-Yahoo! should cause rational advertisers to shift their advertising dollars from Google to Bing.

Cross-Channel Marketing

Advertisers should allocate their advertising spend across the various digital marketing channels including search, display, and Facebook. Each channel serves a significant yet different role in overall management of advertising campaigns. The ability to manage advertising in a transparent cross-channel manner will give advertisers a leg up in getting consumer attention in a market that is becoming increasingly competitive. Efficient Frontier’s prediction is that channels like display and Facebook will double over the next year.

Research Methodology

This analysis was completed based on data from Efficient Frontier search engine marketing customers and the resulting Efficient Frontier Customer Index. The Efficient Frontier Customer Index represents a subset of the company’s clients with spend data for six consecutive quarters or more, whose resulting SEM metrics are then normalized to average industry category contributions established by multiple third-party data providers. The Efficient Frontier Customer Index consists of a fixed sample of large-scale search engine advertisers across multiple sectors, including finance, travel, retail and automotive. The Efficient Frontier Customer Index sheds light on trends in search engine spending and performance on YoY and QoQ basis.

The complete U.S. Digital Performance Marketing Report: Q1 2011 is available for download from the Efficient Frontier website at: http://news.efrontier.com/Global-Q12011-Report.html

http://twitter.com/efrontier

http://www.facebook.com/efrontier

About Efficient Frontier

Efficient Frontier is a leader in online performance marketing managing search marketing, display and social media campaigns for advertisers and agencies around the world. Efficient Frontier currently manages more than $1 billion in annual marketing spend on behalf of their clients globally. Founded in 2002, Efficient Frontier pioneered the application of modern portfolio theory for search engine marketing and today combines its core predictive modeling algorithms and bidding technology with comprehensive strategic and tactical value-added services. The largest and most sophisticated advertisers and agencies partner with Efficient Frontier to achieve and sustain optimal campaign performance and growth in highly complex and competitive marketplaces. The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with offices in New York, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and India, and technology licensing partnerships in Japan, Hong Kong and Australia. Efficient Frontier is a privately held company with funding from Redpoint Ventures and Cambrian Ventures. For more information, please visit http://www.efrontier.com and subscribe to the Efficient Frontier blog at blog.efrontier.com.

London – Techlightenment, an Experian company that develops social media technology, has partnered with Adknowledge, the leading long-tail advertiser marketplace, to launch a social research platform for Facebook, giving brands a fast, cost effective way to gather market intelligence from Facebook’s 500+ million users around the world.  The Social Research Platform (SRP) can layer opt-in social data of a consumer’s interests and demographics on top of survey responses.  Armed with this knowledge, brands can make more informed decisions about advertising campaigns, marketing strategies, product development roadmaps, and competitive positioning.

“In the same way that Hollywood studios screen movies to gauge consumer reaction prior to general release, companies can use the Social Research Platform to test and refine brand messaging or get feedback on products,” said Ankur Shah, co-founder of Techlightenment. “And with the social research platform, we can reach more than 10,000 people, online, in a day.”

Peter Read, former president of Nielsen Entertainment, said, “Unrivalled depth and insight, massive scale and a tenth of the traditional cost – Techlightenment’s social research platform is leading the way in real-time market research on social networks.”

Adknowledge will reward consumers for taking part in surveys by offering virtual currency and in-game points that can be used on a variety of Facebook games.  Brands can also promote surveys on their Facebook pages and websites.  Companies using the SRP have immediate access to survey results and analysis, rather than waiting weeks or months to see any significant data. This can be used to quickly adjust and optimize campaign strategies.  The SRP is not meant to replace traditional market research, but will provide a new level of consumer insight at cost points and in timeframes that were not previously possible. The Social Research Platform is fully compliant with Facebook’s privacy and social game playing guidelines

“Adknowledge connects advertisers with consumers where they spend their time. With the Social Research Platform, we offer virtual currency in exchange for completing surveys,” said John Cole, Managing Director of Adknowledge Europe. “There are hundreds of millions of social gamers in Facebook, 80% of which play at least once a day, and we’ve seen that they are happy to trade their time and attention for rewards in the games they play.  This gives us enormous reach to gather opt-in data for brands, resulting in immediate, customized information on any topic. We’re very excited about partnering with Techlightenment on this project.”

Doc Martens recently tested the product and the company’s CEO, David Suddens, said, “Techlightenment’s social research platform gives us more data and insight about our consumers than we have ever had access to before.”

The SRP represents the increasingly data-driven approach to online and offline advertising giving brands detailed information on whom the customer is and what he or she wants. This increases the conversion rate of advertising campaigns and can help a business make more informed decisions about where and how to spend ad budgets.

“Mediabistro is proud to offer the redesigned SocialTimes.com, which is now the top news blog dedicated solely to social media,” stated Alan M. Meckler, Chairman and CEO of WebMediaBrands, Inc. “The new format publishes content from the various areas of social media including mobile, social games, marketing, web video, and more.”

The SocialTimes.com writing team has expanded to over 15 experts who are dedicated to reporting and analyzing news about the people, business, and culture of social media. SocialTimes.com was originally created by Nick O’Neill, founder of AllFacebook.com, in 2008 to offer the best daily coverage of social media.

About WebMediaBrands Inc.

WebMediaBrands Inc. (Nasdaq: WEBM) (http://www.webmediabrands.com), headquartered in New York, NY, is a leading Internet media company that provides content, education, and career services to media and creative professionals through a portfolio of vertical online properties, communities, and trade shows.

The Company’s online business includes: (i) mediabistro.com, a leading blog network providing content, education, community, and career resources (including the industry’s leading online job board) about major media industry verticals including new media, social media, Facebook, TV news, sports news, advertising, public relations, publishing, design, mobile, and the Semantic Web; and (ii) AllCreativeWorld.com, a leading network of online properties providing content, education, community, career, and other resources for creative and design professionals. The Company’s online business also includes community, membership and e-commerce offerings including a freelance listing service, a marketplace for designing and purchasing logos and premium membership services. The Company’s trade show and educational offerings include conferences, online and in-person courses, and video subscription libraries on topics covered by the Company’s online business.

NEW YORK – Social media have become an influential resource in the U.S. small and medium business (SMB) purchase decision-making process. Among U.S. SMB users, 30% cite that social media has a high influence in driving awareness of new brands, products and/or services, according to AMI-Partners. In addition, 19% of U.S. SMBs cite social media as being highly influential in the final purchase selection. This is no accident. Savvy ICT marketers targeting U.S. SMBs understand that social media initiatives should have a measurable impact on the bottom line.

“The primary outcome of investments in social media by ICT firms must be to increase revenue and/or reduce cost,” says Donald Best, with AMI’s Marketing Advisory and Social Media Practice. “Incremental revenue can come in many forms, with some scenarios leading to direct sales, and others resulting in leads or qualified opportunities which then go through the sales cycle and eventually become a sale. This is true ROI,” Best continues.

As straightforward as this advice sounds, getting there requires clear objectives and discipline. Social media initiatives targeted to SMB decision makers should have clearly defined goals related to the marketing funnel; that is, these efforts should drive awareness, consideration, and/or purchase. Softer goals, including community development and engagement, should serve to drive revenue. For example, getting an SMB decision maker to like a brand on Facebook must lead to a more meaningful, measurable outcome in order to have value. By the same token, no SMB decision maker gets up in the morning deciding to have a relationship with an ICT provider; SMB buyers need and expect relevant information to help them solve problems.

Social Media in the Purchasing Process – Awareness, Consideration and Purchase

Optimizing social media to capture SMB ICT sales requires an understanding of the behaviors of decision makers throughout the sales funnel.

1. Awareness: SMBs are becoming aware of brands and solutions primarily through self-discovery and word-of-mouth through their peer/associate networks on social media. SMBs tend to explore messaging or ads/promos they find noninvasive and relevant.

2. Consideration: The consideration phase is highly dependent upon SMB decision makers being able to gather enough information to become familiar with the brand/solution and determine if they are further interested. During consideration, decision makers may even reach out to the IT or telecom manufacturer or seek out opinions on forums or community sites.

3. Purchase: The actual purchase decision is mainly driven on conclusions made during the consideration phase. At this point, other user experiences and even recommendations for alternative solutions impact the final decision. User evaluation becomes more critical in this phase, as decision makers establish trust through others’ experiences.

AMI recommends that marketers start with revenue goals and then work backwards to try and determine how they could impact the purchase process of SMBs through their social media efforts. The same tactics are often involved, e.g. increasing the number of positive postings, registrations, participation; but by starting with revenue as the goal, marketers are forced to frame their initiatives and their investments in terms of how it will impact that one concrete goal: driving revenue.

Clearly, there are numerous ways to drive revenues from social media, including customer retention, acquisition, channel sales assistance, nurturing customers into advocate roles, etc. Starting with revenue simply puts every activity, investment and idea under an umbrella that can be more easily “sold” internally, and will force marketers to cut anything that doesn’t deliver value to the SMB customer and result in revenue in one form or another.

Related Studies

AMI’s Social Media and SMBs Study is an in-depth, survey-based analysis on how social media impacts the SMB ICT decision making process, and includes data on how social media drives behavior through the marketing funnel. AMI can provide ICT partners with SMB-focused segmentations and strategies for their social media endeavors.

AMI’s Social Media Marketing Best Practices Report is an examination of how leading ICT vendors use social media to drive revenue in the SMB market, and is based upon extensive interviews with social media marketers in several firms.

For more information about these studies, AMI-Partners, or our global SMB research, call 212-944-5100, e-mail ask_ami@ami-partners.com or visit www.ami-partners.com.

About Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc.

AMI-Partners specializes in IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services strategy, venture capital, and actionable market intelligence — with a strong focus on global small and medium businesses (SMBs), and extending into large enterprises and home-based businesses. The AMI-Partners mission is to empower clients for success with the highest quality data, business strategy perspectives and “go-to-market” solutions. Led by Andy Bose, the firm has built a world-class management team with deep experience cutting across IT, telecommunications and business services sectors in established and emerging markets.

AMI-Partners has helped shape the go-to-market SMB strategies of more than 150 leading IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services companies. The firm is well known for its IT and Internet adoption-based segmentation of the SMB markets; its annual retainership services based on global SMB tracking surveys in more than 25 countries; and its proprietary database of SMBs and SMB channel partners in the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific. The firm invests significantly in collecting survey-based information from several thousand SMBs annually, and is considered the premier source for global SMB trends and analysis.

DEERFIELD BEACH, Fla. – Intergi Entertainment, the premier global gaming site representation company, announced that it is one of the select advertising providers for the Facebook Platform. Developers creating applications for the Facebook platform can only use listed providers to monetize Facebook applications.

Intergi Entertainment is comScore’s top ranked destination for reaching online gaming and entertainment enthusiasts. The company enables advertisers to engage with more than 62 million unique consumers including the highly desirable 18-34 year old male and 25-54 year old female demographics.

“With more than 500 million active users, Facebook has quickly become the platform of choice for reaching consumers,” said Jayson Dubin, CEO of Intergi Entertainment. “The opportunity to monetize applications on the Facebook platform is a potentially transformative event for the consumer advertising industry, and Intergi is honored to be included in this selective list of advertising providers.”

Intergi specializes in tailored and integrated advertising campaigns, including banner ads, takeovers, and in-game opportunities. The company is known for providing customized, quality campaigns that support the branding goals of both its advertising and publishing clients.

Intergi represents more than 3,000 of the leading video game publishers worldwide, providing exclusive online video advertising and sales for its high-profile clients. The company recently launched a new online video platform, Playwire, which includes a free online video player for developers and publishers. For more information, please visit: www.playwire.com.

About Intergi Entertainment

Ranked by comScore as a top digital outlet for reaching video game and entertainment enthusiasts online, Intergi Entertainment offers advertisers unparalleled access to millions of online gaming enthusiasts powering the multi-billion dollar gaming industry. Intergi helps connect advertisers and brand managers with the coveted male (18-34) and female (25-54) consumer engaged in online gaming. Intergi creates customized, site specific and channel-wide opportunities designed to help each advertiser deploy tailored, integrated advertising campaigns, including banner ads, takeovers and in-game opportunities, across entertainment and specialized gaming categories. For more information, visit http://www.intergi.com.

SAN DIEGO – Sorenson Media announced a series of robust new features within the Sorenson 360 online video platform (OVP), which provide customers with increased flexibility and customizability to improve delivery of dynamic video content across the Web.

“With more video formats and players than ever before, customers demand choice and control. We designed this new feature to give them both, without sacrificing the ease of use for what is already the most intuitive and highest-quality OVP on the market,” said Eric Quanstrom, COO of Sorenson Media. “With these enhancements, users benefit not only with from full integration with social media tools and the industry-best Squeeze encoding engine, but also from Sorenson 360’s unique mix of comprehensive advantages.”

View Sorenson 360’s full feature set at: http://www.sorensonmedia.com/video-delivery-network/

The enhanced feature set builds on Sorenson 360’s standing reputation for high-quality, full-featured video management and delivery, and enables users to publish video in the widest variety of formats and uncapped, unlimited data rates for playback on any computer or mobile device. The key new features include:

- Full Video Player Compatibility: Users can now choose from all major video players, such as Flash, QuickTime, HTML5 and Silverlight, to publish video in the most popular formats, including Flash (Spark and VP6), MPEG-4 (H.264), WebM and Windows Media (VC1).
- WebM Support: Like all Sorenson Media products and services, Sorenson 360 supports WebM encoding and playback for users interested in creating Web environments using HTML5.
- Facebook Integration: With an integrated button on the video player, users are able to post their video along with comments directly to their Facebook accounts, which can in turn be spread virally via the popular social media site.
- Automated Video Sitemaps for SEO: Advanced search engine optimization (SEO) tools and consistent indexing by major search engines enable customers to have their videos found, without extraordinary effort.
- Closed Captioning Support: Useful for compliance or providing subtitles as part of the video experience.
- Direct Sorenson Squeeze Server Integration: For users with large volumes of video encoding and delivery needs, the Squeeze Server/Sorenson 360 integration gives users a unique tool that utilizes Sorenson Media’s encoding prowess to create the highest-quality video as well as the intuitive and custom video management and delivery capabilities of the Sorenson 360 OVP.

For the past six months, IDEA Health & Fitness Association has been using Sorenson 360 to encode, manage and deliver hundreds of educational fitness videos to its user base of health, wellness and fitness professionals. With the new integration of Sorenson Squeeze Server, this leading health and fitness organization plans to further streamline the process it uses to encode and manage content submitted by its clients, while also enabling those users to tap into Sorenson 360’s user-specific content management capabilities.

“Since implementing Sorenson 360, we have been able to streamline so many steps in the online video delivery process that used to require a lot of hours and expertise to manage,” said Gus Aguirre, User Interface Designer for IDEA Health & Fitness Association. “We have already begun testing the Sorenson Squeeze Server integration and love what we see. The true beauty of Sorenson 360 is that it allows us to focus more time on the products and services we provide. The video quality, speed and options we have with Sorenson 360 enable us to get our visual messages out to an ever-wider audience of fitness and wellness professionals.”

In addition to the seamless integration with Squeeze Server and other new features, Sorenson 360 users have access to the OVPs:

- Powerful, best-in-class quality encoding with professional filters
- Multi-user and sub-account functionality
- Seamless integration with the leading video production suites, such as Apple’s Final Cut and iMovie, Adobe Premiere and Avid’s suite of editing applications
- Intelligent embed codes, including native support for iPhone, iPad and other Apple products
- Detailed engagement analytics
- HD video support
- Reliable, redundant, scalable cloud service built on Amazon Web Services infrastructure
- APIs for developers

Sorenson 360’s superior video quality is based on Sorenson Media’s history of encoding expertise and understanding of online video needs. Working seamlessly with the company’s gold-standard video encoding application, Sorenson Squeeze, and all versions of Sorenson Squeeze Server, Sorenson 360 enables customers to employ optimized presets, video filters, fully customizable players and unlimited data rates for RTMP streaming across 15 points-of-presence throughout the globe.

Pricing and Availability

The new features are available in every Sorenson 360 account. For additional pricing and feature information, contact sales@sorensonmedia.com.

About Sorenson Media

Sorenson Media (www.sorensonmedia.com) is an award-winning provider of the highest quality, differentiated video encoding solutions. With highly scalable cloud- and server-based encoding solutions and desktop applications, Sorenson Media empowers the enterprise and video professionals to easily and cost-effectively encode, transcode, manage and deliver the highest-quality video online and to mobile devices. Since 1995, Sorenson Media has been at the forefront of bringing online and mobile video into the economic and cultural mainstream. As video rapidly proliferates online, businesses and video professionals increasingly rely on Sorenson Media’s innovative solutions and legacy of trust to meet their evolving needs.

ARF 2011 – uSamp:

WHO:

Chuck Miller, chief research officer of uSamp (www.uSamp.com), and president and founder of DMS, a leader in online research since 1995. With uSamp’s technology, clients receive valuable feedback from approximately 4.7 million informed and motivated respondents around the globe who participate in panels, surveys and question-and-answer sessions. DMS provides sample to the market research industry via online panels and Opinion Place, leveraging websites to reach 90 percent of U.S. Internet households to create broad-based, real-time consumer samples.

WHAT:
uSamp’s Miller will be part of a Diamond Learning Session at the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) 2011 annual convention in New York City. The session – “The Need for Speed – Use Social, Mobile and More to Accelerate Your Insight Strategy” – is sponsored by J.D. Power & Associates, NetBase and uSamp.

Miller will be joined by several industry leaders. Merrill Dubrow, president and CEO of M/A/R/C Research, will moderate the panel discussion, which features representatives from leading “smart” companies: Stan Sthanunathan, Coca-Cola; Angelike Galdi, L’Oreal; James Williams-Ness, Sesame Street; and Lynn Hermans, Taco Bell. All are using new social, mobile and other digital research methodologies to find insights in real-time, develop innovative products, create more effective campaigns, manage crisis communications and more.

Among the issues the panel will explore:

• How major brands use insights from real-time social media conversations to make key marketing decisions
• How companies can be more “anticipatory” in their research
• How to combine research approaches and arrive at insights and actions rapidly

WHEN:
Tuesday, March 22, 2011, from 4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., Shubert Complex, 6th Floor, Marriott Marquis, New York City.

About uSamp

uSamp (www.uSamp.com) is one of the world’s fastest growing technology and online sample companies, providing global survey panelists and an innovative sampling platform for use in market research. uSamp develops collaborative market research tools to foster more rewarding, profitable relationships between organizations and the people they serve. Founded in 2008, uSamp acquired DMS Insights in June 2010 and now has 160 team members worldwide and approximately 4.7 million global market research panelists. The company’s web-based panel platform is transforming the management and delivery of online panel for market researchers, offering unprecedented access over their panel. uSamp’s deep well of proprietary technologies includes SampleMarket™, PanelNet™, PanelShield™, Opinion Place® River and real-time Panel Book Search – cutting-edge solutions for accessing, branding, sampling and managing panels. uSamp is based in Los Angeles, with offices in Dallas, London, New Delhi and Trumbull, CT.

Adobe Omniture Summit 2011
SALT LAKE CITY – Adobe Omniture Summit 2011 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) introduced Adobe® SocialAnalytics, a new product within the Adobe Online Marketing Suite, powered by Omniture®, enabling marketers to monitor, measure and monetize social media. Adobe customers now have a single application that aggregates all relevant activity from social networks and online communities and identifies how that activity impacts key business metrics and brand perception, ultimately guiding social activity across channels and driving ROI. Adobe SocialAnalytics has been previewed at Adobe Omniture Summit 2011.

“The social Web is the largest focus group on the planet and marketers are striving to figure out how best to listen and participate,” said Brad Rencher, vice president and general manager, Omniture Business Unit, Adobe. “What marketers have been missing is a solution that helps them identify the most relevant voices and activities, tie social activity to brand and business impact and then take action to optimize that impact. Adobe SocialAnalytics can inform how a company participates on the social Web, removing guesswork and replacing it with strategies or experimentation built on insight.”

With Adobe SocialAnalytics, customers can monitor and measure popular platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, blogs, forums and any place where social conversations are occurring to see their valuable social data in context with all of their online initiatives. This helps marketers get quick answers to business questions such as: What is social media’s impact on my business? How are our social initiatives and conversations driving conversion of revenue? Who are the social influencers for my business? When positive social sentiment peaks, does our Web traffic peak or are our conversion metrics positively impacted?

Adobe SocialAnalytics augments the company’s existing, innovative social measurement and optimization capabilities, including:

Facebook Measurement

Marketers can utilize Adobe SocialAnalytics to understand the effectiveness for some of the unique elements of Facebook such as Facebook Pages, fan demographics, likes and shares, etc. Seeing this data in context with the actual conversations occurring on Facebook can deliver insights into how best to engage your customers on Facebook.

Facebook App Measurement and Mobile App Measurement

Using Adobe SocialAnalytics, marketers can view their app usage data in context with other social activity. This helps marketers further identify the effectiveness of their social and mobile app strategy and how this strategy affects or is affected by other social activities.

Viral Video Measurement

With viral video measurement, customers get insight into the performance of viral video campaigns across video sharing sites and are able to further refine how they use video across the social Web.

Twitter Measurement

This capability allows online marketers to measure brand activity on the popular microblogging site. Within the context of Adobe SocialAnalytics, marketers can see how spikes in Twitter activity affect other channels, including site visits and other onsite behavior.

Availability

Adobe SocialAnalytics is currently in beta and will be generally available in Q3 of 2011. For more information, please contact your account manager.

About the Adobe Online Marketing Suite

The Adobe Online Marketing Suite, powered by Omniture, offers an integrated and open platform for online business optimization, a strategy for using customer insight to drive innovation throughout the business and enhance marketing efficiency. The Suite consists of integrated applications to collect and unleash the power of customer insight to optimize customer acquisition, conversion and retention efforts as well as the creation and distribution of content. For example, using the Suite, marketers can identify the most effective marketing strategies and ad placements as well as create relevant, personalized and consistent customer experiences across digital marketing channels, such as onsite, display, e-mail, social, video and mobile. The Suite enables marketers to make quick adjustments, automate certain customer interactions and better maximize marketing ROI, which, ultimately, can positively impact the bottom line.

About Adobe Systems Incorporated

Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. For more information, visit www.adobe.com.

“Our goal is to help marketers engage consumers beyond the initial ‘like,’” said Steve Semelsberger, SVP & GM of Social Solutions for Demand Media. “We have worked closely with Facebook since Connect was introduced in 2009. As an original launch partner, we helped marketers bring Facebook’s functionality to their websites. Now we’re helping marketers bring Pluck functionality from their websites to their Facebook pages to drive deeper engagement on Facebook.”

Through this partnership, Pluck becomes the first third party platform to build an application for the Buddy Media platform—the Facebook management system of choice for eight out of ten global advertisers. Pluck enables social engagement with enterprise-class moderation, management and reporting across digital channels. The result is one community engaged in a seamless conversation across the brand’s website and its Facebook page.

“Our partnership with Demand Media is a powerful example of what is possible when building on top of the Buddy Media Platform,” said Buddy Media CEO Michael Lazerow. “It’s a win for both companies and it’s exciting to see all of the possibilities take form. We’re energized about this opportunity as it’s a better and more enriched experience for both Facebook users and marketers.”

Demand Media plans to introduce Buddy Media-optimized versions of other Pluck applications, including Photos, along with features like Top Rated Products, in the future. The new Pluck Forums application is available immediately from Demand Media’s Pluck service offering. For further information, visit www.pluck.com.

About Demand Media

Demand Media (NYSE:DMD) is a leading online media company that informs, entertains and connects millions of people every day. Through a portfolio of vertical web properties that reaches more than 100 million monthly visitors, a global network of digital partners, and an innovative content studio, Demand Media publishes what the world wants to know and share. Founded in 2006, Demand Media is headquartered in Santa Monica, CA with offices in Bellevue, WA, Austin, TX, New York, NY, Chicago, IL and London, UK. For more information visit: www.demandmedia.com.

About Buddy Media

The Buddy Media Platform is the Facebook management system of choice for eight out of the ten top global advertisers. With its scalable, secure architecture and straightforward administrative tools, it is the only solution that allows brands to launch, maintain and measure their Facebook presence in any country and in any language. Buddy Media shares four investors with Facebook and was one of the first companies selected by Facebook as a preferred developer partner. The company is backed by WPP (NASDAQ: WPPGY), Softbank Capital, Institutional Venture Partners, GGVC, Greycroft Partners, Facebook investor Ron Conway, Facebook board member Peter Thiel, Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus, Roger Ehrenberg, and others. For more information, visit http://www.buddymedia.com.

Under this agreement, Dentsu, as Facebook’s official ad sales representative in the Japanese market, will provide consultation on effective Facebook Page (see Note 1) development, exclusively market Facebook Premium Ads, and offer new marketing strategies utilizing Facebook that are tied into ad placements in the mass media to advertisers in Japan.

“Dentsu will be a valuable partner for us as we seek to support marketers in Japan to connect and engage with their customers,” said Blake Chandlee, Vice President & Commercial Director, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Emerging Markets, Facebook. “Dentsu understands the unique social marketing opportunity on Facebook, and will work directly with brands here to help them create and implement campaigns that will impact their businesses in meaningful ways.”

“As communication styles diversify, social networking, which directly connects consumers to other consumers, has become a vital communications medium in the world today,” said Dentsu Executive Officer Akira Sugimoto. “I believe that our collaboration with Facebook will play a key role in our initiatives to further strengthen links between consumers and corporations.”

Facebook has more than 500 million users worldwide, and many brands and businesses around the world are already integrating Facebook as part of their marketing activities. Campaigns in which advertisements in Facebook are linked to a wide variety of advertisements in the mass media are becoming increasingly apparent.

Through this alliance, Dentsu will propose and implement new communications strategies and marketing activities utilizing the Facebook platform to advertisers and media companies, in addition to creating new advertising models that will generate new revenue streams.

cyber communications inc., a subsidiary of Dentsu Inc., will act as the media representative for sales of advertising space on Facebook.

Looking forward, the Dentsu Group will provide optimal solutions for the new marketing activities required by companies in this age of social communication.

The main points of the agreement are as follows.

Main points of the business collaboration agreement

As Facebook’s official ad sales representative in the Japanese market, Dentsu will obtain from Facebook the latest technical information and examples of how to use the services, and will provide consulting services to advertisers and media companies.
With the cooperation of Facebook, Dentsu will create Facebook Pages that maximize the platform’s functions in order to provide added value to advertisers and media companies.
Dentsu will have exclusive sales rights to the premium advertising space on Facebook for a one-year period from February 18, 2011, and will develop new advertising strategies in Japan that link advertisements in the mass media (such as television, newspapers, magazines and radio) with advertisements on Facebook.
Utilizing the technical support provided by Facebook, Dentsu will develop new plans and business related to advertisements and promotions that utilize the Facebook platform.
Dentsu will proactively incorporate into its proposals to clients Facebook Premium Ads with social context (see Note 2) that Facebook currently offers.

Note 1
Facebook Page
Facebook Pages are for organizations, businesses, brands, celebrities, and bands to broadcast information in an official, public manner to people who choose to connect with them. Similar to profiles, Facebook Pages can be enhanced with applications that help the entity communicate and engage with their audiences, and capture new audiences virally through friend recommendations, News Feed stories, Facebook events, and beyond.

Note 2
Facebook Premium Ads with Social Context
Facebook Premium Ads run with 100% share of voice, and may include any of the following: polls, events, likes, and videos. Facebook ads show when your friends on Facebook have liked or interacted with a certain brand or product. This makes the ads more personalized to individuals and more effective for advertisers.

About Facebook, Inc.
Founded in February 2004, Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. Anyone can sign up for Facebook and interact with the people they know in a trusted environment. Facebook is a privately held company and is headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

Facebook® is a registered trademark of Facebook Inc.

About Dentsu Inc.
Founded in 1901, Dentsu Inc. has held the position of the world’s largest single-brand agency for almost 40 years. Through its unique “Integrated Communication Design” approach, Dentsu offers multinational clients the most comprehensive range of advertising and marketing services in the industry. While continuing to pursue innovation in the digital arena, Dentsu is active in the production and marketing of sports movies, anime and other entertainment content on a global scale. The Dentsu Group has more than 6,000 clients and close to 20,000 employees worldwide.
For more information, please visit: http://www.dentsu.com/.

About cyber communications inc.
cci, established in 1996 as a subsidiary of Dentsu Inc. in the early stages of the online advertising market in Japan, has led the market’s growth. cci established the business model whereby, as a media representative, it makes connections between thousands of online media and advertising agencies in Japan. cci describes itself as a total interactive, one-stop marketing service company that provides various services regarding Internet advertising such as media planning, ad serving technology, ad creative service and market analysis.
For more information, please visit: http://www.cci.co.jp/en/overview/.

SOPHIA ANTIPOLIS, France – How much does recruiting Facebook fans really cost? What real benefits can a business gain from it? What is the true value of a fan over time? These are just a few of many legitimate questions that until now were difficult or impossible to answer. Reactivpub has transformed the measurement of Facebook ROI by launching the first solution for monitoring the performance of Facebook fans.

For any business or advertiser, the interest to be present on a social network such as Facebook lies primarily in the recruitment of fans who are, in essence, hot prospects or loyal customers with a real influence on the brand. But what company ever dreamed it would be possible to analyze the effectiveness of its Facebook fan recruitment with its existing acquisition with a single solution? How many advertisers have ever wished they could measure the actual profit attributed to its presence on Facebook? For the first time ever, Reactivpub makes this all possible and allows the recruitment of Facebook fans to become an easily measurable customer acquisition and retention mechanism directly comparable with other online recruitment tools (emailing, coregistration, media campaigns, quizzes, etc.). This innovation is based on the R-Tracking tracking technology built into Reactivpub, which assigns a unique identifier (or RUID) to any user exposed to an advertising message, whatever the delivery medium – website, emailing, or social media. Just like a genetic marker, the RUID not only enables the identification of new fans of a given brand or advertiser in the same way as with classic recruitment, but it also tracks their value over time.

For brands, the prospects are enormous. For example, for acquisition purposes, Reactivpub uses membership as leverage for fan recruitment by offering a pay per performance compensation, the CPF (Cost Per Fan) advertising model in addition to the more conventional CPL (Cost Per Lead), CPS (Cost Per Sale), CPC (Cost Per Click) and CPM (cost per thousand views) models. With over 500 million Facebook users worldwide and a penetration rate in France that surpasses 30%*, the CPF offers tremendous potential for recruiting loyal prospects for a brand, which is characterized by a strong recommendation power (more than one person out of two is more inclined to buy a branded product or to visit a specific store if one of his friends is a fan of that brand or store). Moreover, as opposed to a qualified email address, the fan does not incur any additional operating costs, like routing fees for example. The CPF could very well in fact herald the dawn of a revolution in online recruitment methods.

Last but not least, among other benefits, Reactivpub also enables brands to measure the actual conversion (generated sales, registrations, traffic) from fans recruited on the Reactivpub network and monitoring installation of Facebook applications and impact on conversions. So many possibilities for developing a real Social Shopping strategy.

* Source:Facebook.

About Reactivpub
Reactivpub, the leading affiliate network in France and throughout Europe, is a global solution for performance marketing and a technology allowing advertisers and agencies to maximise the ROI of their online marketing efforts and enabling publishers to increase the yield of their advertising inventory. An expert of ROI and multichannel online acquisition, Reactivpub reaches more than 35 million* unique visitors in Europe and provides on-going innovations for its clients through new acquisition and tracking technology.
Reactivpub is a division of “R”, Europe’s performance marketing specialist.

www.reactivpub.com – presse@r-advertising.com

* Source : Reactivpub november 2010

About “R”
R designs innovative performance marketing solutions which allow companies to boost the sales of their products and services online, providing them with the interactive tools they need to scale their online business. R’s global expertise is grounded on his knowledge and experience within the main sectors of online marketing :

Performance marketing
Behavioral email marketing
Worldwide traffic sources
Websites, Optin databases, social media marketing
SaaS technology
This strategy is backed by the awarding of certifications and labels (Sender Score, Surety Mail, Yahoo Third Party Ad Server) that highlight the quality of R products and services and strengthen a lasting relationship with partners.

SAN FRANCISCO – iPost, a leading provider of on-demand email and cross-channel marketing solutions, announced that it has integrated the ability to spark conversations and cross-promote campaigns on Facebook and Twitter into its iPost Mailing Manager (iMM) connected digital marketing platform. The company’s vision to evolve its iMM beyond an email and web marketing tool into a connected multi-channel platform began in October 2010 when it added mobile marketing (SMS) capabilities. With advanced new Facebook and Twitter functionality, the iMM now unifies email, social, mobile and web marketing in a single platform, allowing digital marketers to cross promote campaigns, manage subscribers, fans, and followers, analyze and understand their customers’ behavior across multiple channels, and engage in customer conversations where they occur.

The new features in iMM allow marketers to automate, optimize and analyze highly dynamic campaigns. For example, when scheduling an email offer, marketers can also schedule a post to the company’s Facebook wall including the relevant link that will automatically notify fans when that email campaign launches. Similarly, on Twitter, they can schedule tweets with links to offers that go live when the corresponding email campaigns do.

In the creative department, the iMM now enables easy transformation of email copy into Facebook notes. In the analytics department, a set of reports allows companies to analyze the engagement and sharing behavior of their fans and followers.

The iMM already included the basic capabilities to cross-pollinate email and social media with follow us, share-with-your-network (SWYN), and forward-to-a-friend (FTAF) links.

John Janetos, iPost’s vice president of business development and marketing, believes that email marketing remains the backbone of digital outreach due to its ubiquity and ROI. “However, in today’s multi-connected world, marketers need to forge deeper and more relevant relationships by conversing with their customers in multiple ways wherever they are.”

About iPost

iPost provides an on-demand connected digital marketing platform and professional services that let marketers manage, execute, analyze, and optimize customer conversations where they occur, including email, mobile, social, and web. Customers include O’Reilly Media, Ogden Publications, and Kimpton Hotels. To contact iPost: 899 Northgate Drive, Suite 200, San Rafael, CA 94903; 877-934-7678; 415-382-4000; info@ipost.com; www.ipost.com.

Almost half of UK web users are social networkers, and time spent on the sites is rising quickly. Advertiser dollars are growing along with usage, and CPG marketers in particular are making social media an important part of the marketing mix. 2010 was a breakthrough year for social media in the UK. eMarketer estimates that 21.8 million people used social networks – almost half of the online population. By 2014, about 60% of all UK web users will be social networkers.

The time spent on social networks is rising too. In August 2010, visitors to Facebook spent an average 5 hours and 47 minutes on the site, according to the UK Online Measurement Company and Nielsen, and in September 2010, only Google boasted a greater market share of website visits than Facebook, according to Experian Hitwise.

Most advertisers see social media as a uniquely promising channel in which to build brand awareness, promote goods and services, solicit customer feedback and encourage long-term interaction. Spending is rising quickly; UK social network ad spending will reach an estimated 275 million ($430 million) in 2012, more than double the 130 million ($203 million) spent in 2010.

Consumer packaged goods (CPG)which in the UK are called fast-moving consumer goods accounted for 11.8% of all online ad spending in H1 2010, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau UK (IAB UK) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). Though most CPG brands were initially slow to embrace online advertising, many now see excellent returns from digital channels. Social media is an increasingly important part of the CPG marketing mix.

Key questions this report answers:

* What proportion of UK online advertising spending goes to social networks?
* How many UK internet users are active on social networks?
* How do UK web users engage with brands online and in social media?
* How are CPG brands using social media to address the UK audience?

Key Topics Covered:

* Executive Summary
* Key Questions
* The eMarketer View
* Ad Spending in UK Social Networks
* The Mobile Opportunity
* Consumer Usage of Social Networks
* Consumer Engagement with Brands in Social Media
* Facebook vs. Other Sites
* Advertisers Use of Social Media
* Loyalty and Reward Schemes
* Games, Contests and Votes
* Branded Events and Experiences
* Using Social Media for Consumer Goods Research

Sources/Contributors:

* Blue Latitude
* Booz & Company
* CheckFacebook.com
* comScore Media Metrix
* Connect Insight
* DDB Optimum
* eCircle
* Econsultancy
* eMarketer
* Grocery Manufacturers of America (GMA)
* Guava
* Inside Network
* Internet Advertising Bureau UK (IAB UK)
* Lightspeed Research
* Mobile Marketing Association (MMA)
* Office of Communications (Ofcom) – UK
* PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)
* Vision Critical

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/fe24ee/uk_social_network.