The beauty of social media is that there are so many ways of doing it. To some people, this might sounds challenging, if it’s viewed as “too many things, where to start?”. If you look at from a different angel, it actually shows how social media is powerful, and can be very easy and simple at the same time. One example that I just saw while I was looking at my Facebook page:

• Target posted a simple feed to the fans “Targets want to hear what you think about our guys’ clothing selection” and there are 3 more detailed questions within the same feed.
• Within the first 12 hours of posting, it received over 250 Likes and 800 Comments!

two screenshots:

1, how this campaign shows up on my personal profile page:

2, all comments of Target wall:

Why this is so exciting:

• the cost is so low: it’s just a facebook feed. it’s so easy & quick to implement and doesn’t even require any money!
• the response is huge: look at the numbers of responses within the first 12 hours. Comparing with your traditional campaigns or research, how can you get feedback this quick?
• it’s a great way to get customer feedback: it’s almost like open ended questions. All the comments are from the Target fans and it’s great insight and valuable data!
• it’s a great way to keep the dialogue and build communities: traditional media and research won’t give user any chance to interact, but in this campaign, people can see each other’s comments - that’s the best way of building WOM

Conclusion: don’t be scared about social media. It can be simple and easy. The point is that you need to get started somewhere now!

Tags: Facebook, On the Web, Online Communities, research, social media, social network, Social network service, Twitter

• research data around “yellow page shift to search” on LinkedIn Answers
• future of marketing on LinkedIn Answers
• LinkedIn company profile (trend on career path from one company to another)
• LinkedIn event

Tags: crowdsourcing, linkedin, research, social media, social network

Online advertising is such a good industry to be in. Regardless the house market crisis, or the Internet bubble, online advertising is still showing strong growth rate year over year.

Jupiter’s forecast for 2008 US online display ad spending growth is 15% to 16%. Jupiter’s David Card, posted the Q2 scorecard:

- Google. Own sites up 42% to $3.5 billion. Network up 22% to $1.7 billion. International outgrew US and is over half of Google’s total for the first time.
- Yahoo. Own sites up 14% to $1 billion. Network down 4% to $570 million
- MSN. Up 18% to $618 million, but not all that growth is organic. Some of it’s from acquisitions. And it was Microsoft’s fiscal fourth quarter, so they had feet on the gas.
- AOL up 2% to $530 million (more detail after the earnings call). UPDATED AOL’s display ad sales on its own properties were down 14% to $191 million. Search was up 10% to $172 million and its third-party network up 15% to $167 million.
- Fox Interactive Media - which is mostly MySpace - up 23% to $225 million.

New York Times Digital was up 18%; Martha Stewart up 31%, Washington Post up 4% but display was up 11%. Disney and Viacom didn’t say much, so presumably they had some growth but not high double digits.

Cart’s original post

Tags: advertising, online advertising, recession, research, web marketing