Emarketer.com added a new article recently about ad spending in social networks. Since I just posted about social media and advertising , I thought this would be a great follow up.

Emarketer had previously released projections on ad spending in which they reduced in this most recent projection saying, "Today’s economy, combined with the fact that social networks are still trying to come up with successful ad models, has led to lowered ad spending projections for the next few years."

Here’s their projection model for the next few years. While it appears to be a small drop in the total projection.

And here’s a great comparison showing the estimated percentage social networking ad spending will be to that of total ad spending:

Here’s a link to their article. It’s a great read!

We’ve been hard at work over the last several days getting a new fan page for Erin Hession Photography launched on Facebook. The concept is simple: create a page to show your brand, upload photos, videos, notes, company bio, websites and more and your friends can become fans of the brand.

Check it out and become a fan of Erin Hession Photography today!

Okay, I don’t normally post bad reviews, but I just had a really bad experience at S&K Menswear. There is something to be said for customer service, especially when you are earning a commission. I even had a good experience last time I bought a suit there, but this trip undid it all and turned me away from their brand.

I promise I won’t go into specifics, but I will say that not only was I treated poorly, but the salesperson made a spectacle of it with his coworkers and other customers and he continued to do so several times. I was so appalled that I decided that it was better to buy from someone else, even if that competitor was more expensive.

Now this isn’t to say that I would have had this experience at one of their other stores. It could have been one bad apple. But that’s all it takes to create that image in the consumers mind. Good customer service is essential, even if you’re not dealing directly with a consumer and is rewarded with customer loyalty. Bad customer service can hurt you beyond measure.

I guess I’ll just find a suit elsewhere!

Twitter or email me of you want the specifics

In a previous post, I blogged about Social Media and Advertising and how advertising on social media and UGC websites will have a moderate growth in the coming future. In this post, I’ll expand on the previous post as well as highlight the effectiveness of social media advertising in order to determine if it’s a valuable investment.

Social media advertising is not for every business or organization. For instance, ComScore released the results of a survey last year on advertising effectiveness with various mediums and the responsiveness of consumers to that advertising. Overall, they found that 28% of respondents were likely to notice advertising on social media and less than that 23% are likely to trust the advertisements they notice. Those numbers put social media websites at #5 on the list behind television, print, news and corporate websites.

Influencing Factors

Effectiveness can also be influenced by a number of factors.

Industry

There are certain industries that convert better on social sites than others. For the entertainment industry, 66% of respondents were more likely to be receptive to advertising on social media sites while 48% were more likely to be receptive on news and general media websites. At the same time, the telecom industry had the same number of respondents in both the social media and general media category. And for industries like pharmaceuticals and financial services, respondents were less likely to respond on social sites than they were on general media sites.

Audience

In any marketing campaign, you have to look at the demographics of the audience. Depending on the audience of a social media website, a campaign can have a better or worse response. There are networks available for any demographic you are looking for; from kids, to teenagers, to twenty and thirty somethings, to new moms, brides, sports fans, technology enthusiasts and more. Generally speaking, you have to find the right demographic for what you are marketing to have the best conversion.

Reach

For a social media site to be an effective medium, it has to have a large audience reach or a large audience that fits your demographic. For instance, according to compete.com, Facebook has a monthly audience of 31 million people and pageviews of 350 million. Now is that a targeted demographic, no; but with that number you can use targeting to filter down to your desired demographic.

Targeting

Social media has offered a tool that has not been best utilized until now. You see with social media, we’re better able to target our marketing campaigns to specific demographics because their advertising power is based on the personal information that is entered by the users. For instance, a singles website could target their advertising only to those consumers who are single and looking, a movie studio could target a specific age range that they think would be most interested in their film, and a college could target those who don’t have a college degree. The power of targeting is directly tied to the ability of the consumer to control the information they input in an online community.

Other factors

There are a number of other smaller factors that can influence social media advertising. Some of those include the mood of the consumer when they are influenced by your ad, their history with your company or brand, whether the information they’ve entered into their profile is really accurate, etc. These are smaller influences, but still important ones to consider.

Click Thru Rate

Does social media convert when it comes to click thru’s? First, let me say that I don’t have access to hard numbers when it comes to the average social media advertisements. What I can safely say from my research is that social media advertisements seem to have lower response rate than that of traditional online media. From my research, I have found certain networks, Facebook for example, to have anywhere from a 0.1% response rate to a 4% response rate depending upon the marketing campaign. With other online advertising mediums (Google Adwords in this instance), the response rate has been anywhere from 1% to 7% and higher (again depending upon the campaign).

Now, this isn’t to say that there are not social networks pulling really good numbers, but because Facebook is a large player, I wanted to pull a large average statistic.

This would indicate that social media advertising is a medium that still has some maturing yet to go. The power of it though, is phenomenal and social media will be a big player as time goes on and the industry advances, but for now, it’s not as great a medium as is offered by other online mediums.

I’ll be watching this trend closely and will update as time goes by. For updates and new items on this topic, follow me on twitter or friendfeed .

Big News!!! You can now post comments on my blog using video! Thanks to Seesmic.com. Last week, Seesmic released a plug-in for Wordpress that allows you to post video comments on my blog. You can check out the plug-in by clicking here. Or feel free to leave a video comment down below!

Thanks Loic!

Here’s another great article from eMarketer on Social Media and advertising.

They’ve extrapolated statistics on online adverting with social media and user generated content (UGC). Right now advertising on UGC content is only .77% of total online advertising, which is very minuscule considering the massive popularity of social networking websites and the impressive ability to target certain demographics.

By 2012, they estimate that growth in online advertising on UGC content will only reach 1.62% of total online advertising. Here’s their extrapolation:

Next time, I’ll post on the effectiveness and conversion of online advertising on social media and I’ll compare that with the total participation in UGC advertising to see if advertising in social media is a gold mine of missed opportunity or if it’s still a developing sector that should be watched closely.

Track my friendfeed to get updates.

Okay, so I’ve been working on testing a number of new services lately. FriendFeed is one that has not been out very long, but it is incredible! It’s a service that combines updates from many services you use online (right now, it pulls from 35 different services) including, Twitter, blogs, flickr, delicious, Google Reader, LinkedIn, YouTube, digg and more.

So for example, I bookmark 3 stories on delicious, it’ll display to those following my friendfeed that I bookmarked those articles and makes the links available to them. At the same time it will tell followers when you make a blog post, add a video to YouTube, post a status update to Twitter and it’ll post those items to your feed as well. Currently I use it to display my Twitter status updates, delicious bookmarks, new blog posts, and YouTube videos. You can see my friendfeed by clicking here .

It’s been described by many, including myself, as a firehose of information. And rightly so! With the incredible amount of updates that are posted from multiple sources a day it can seem that almost every minute you’re presented with new updates and links. In fact, I follow 10 different sources (mainly from tech bloggers) and my friendfeed seems to have new items every 3 minutes! This is great if you’re following someone on Twitter who updates often, but it can be too much for those that occasionally follow someone using any of these services.

In addition to the friendfeed website, you can also download an app called "Alert Thingy " (I know, couldn’t they have thought of a better name?) to display your friendfeed updates on your desktop. For me this application is constantly updating, which I love and it keeps me from having to go back to the friendfeed website for my updates.

Of course, these two services are not for everybody, while it can improve your productivity on tracking updates from those you follow, it can also cause information overload (although because I follow a lot more tech blogs, I tend to get a lot more information than most), but if you are looking to simplify the process of tracking blog posts and twitter updates, it can really help!

Facebook messaged all the fans of their upcoming release of the new Facebook profile designs with helpful information on viral marketing. It’s a good read. Much of it is basic, but it can help you understand the basics of viral marketing using Facebook.


Facebook Insider’s Guide to Viral Marketing - Get more documents

Yesterday SixApart, the creators of the popular TypePad blogging system released a Facebook application called BlogIt that allows you to blog simple posts and have the post published to your blog, whether it be through TypePad, Wordpress, Blogger, Movable Type and more and have the title of the post added to Twitter, Pownce, and Facebook as a status update.

The purpose of the application is to enable the author the ability to share posted items quickly and to streamline the sharing process.

You can get more information by clicking here .

Nick O’Neill added an excellent post to his blog today on the different personalities of Facebook users. The author, Brandon Rennels is a pure comedic genius and compiled this list after using Facebook for the past four years.

Here’s a link to the post. It’s a long one, but exceptionally funny and well thought out!

Which one matches you???

Me? I think I closest fit with the News Feed Neurotic:
“It’s as if your life was an RSS feed wired directly to their brain.”