SocialTimes.com |
| Social Advertising Faces Big Privacy Debate Posted: 23 Jun 2008 01:25 PM CDT Today at the OMMA Social in New York City, Seth Goldstein, founder of social media advertising network SocialMedia, announced a new service for advertisers called “Friendship Ranks.” The new service combines data related to peoples’ interactions on Facebook applications to generate more effectively targeted ads. Seth also formally announced “social banners”, a service the company has been experimenting with over the past few months. The “social banners” are an opt-out advertising service which resides within Facebook applications. Sound familiar? The whole Facebook beacon “fiasco” (as it was coined by the press), was due to it being an opt-out service. SocialMedia has been able to figure out a way to display your friends within advertisements that are present on applications. Technically, they’ve also figured out a way to display a fair amount of this information outside of Facebook. Two weeks ago while attending the Graphing Social Patterns East conference, one of the attendees approached me to show a page on SocialMedia.com’s website that was able to display targeted ads to me based on information they had collected. I have included a screenshot below. Initially, I chose not to write a post on the issue because I wanted to make sure I got all the facts right. I have since reached out to people that deal with privacy at Facebook about the issue but haven’t heard back yet. I’m guessing I’ll hear something from them in the near future though. So how does SocialMedia display these targeted ads outside of Facebook? Through a collection of data via applications in combination with images obtained via user public profiles and unique cookies they can piece together who you are and who some of your friends are. This is off of Facebook. There are a number of issues at hand and many of them are extremely complex. Let me first say that I believe that social advertising has an extremely promising future. While it has yet to be perfected, I think that one day social advertising can generate more effective ads then traditional banner (and comparable) advertising. This area must be explored further though because the industry as a whole is entering uncharted territory and one slip up could negatively impact the entire industry. In my own experience, arriving at an external site that knows who my friends are is shocking. My guess is that the average user will also be slightly creeped out about how that information was obtained. After dwelling on the topic of privacy and transparency for third-party ad networks for the past couple weeks I’ve come up with a number of issues. First of all, it is clear that Facebook is having a tough time monitoring third-party ad networks but they feel obligated to maintain a healthy ecosystem for these companies. It has become somewhat of a conflict of interest and Facebook will need to become more transparent about their privacy discussions with third-parties to maintain trust with their users. Users must be aware of companies that have access to their personal information when they are installing applications. There are other ad networks which would like to mimic some of the functionality that SocialMedia offers in their “social banners” but they are hesitant to create similar offerings because this has clearly become a gray area. The combination of publicly available information and information within Facebook through the use of automated systems becomes a really fragile subject. There is a serious need for public discussion about the issue of privacy on the Facebook platform and competing platforms before we have a disaster on our hands. The industry is walking a thin line and keeping the discussions behind closed doors could irreparably damage everybody involved. What are your thoughts about the current state of privacy with third-party applications? How can we get the conversation about privacy started? Also, what types of privacy standards do you think are important to protect users? |
| OMMA Social Monetization Panel Posted: 23 Jun 2008 11:09 AM CDT This morning I walked in to the OMMA Social conference at the beginning of a panel on monetization. The panel included Jim Nail of TNS Media Intelligence, Steve Jang of imeem, Seth Goldstein of SocialMedia, Brian Wieser of MAGNA Global and Jeremy Helfand of Classmates.com. There was a healthy debate over how and if it is possible to monetize social media effectively. In discussing whether or not there is substantial money in social media, Seth Goldstein brought up a rumor of a large computer company recently spending a $10 million insertion fee to get into this space. So yes, there is money but Seth also emphasized that social media advertising is currently experimental. In response to a question about whether or not social media monetization is sustainable, Jeremy Helfand says that this was the same discussion that took place years ago for interactive as a whole. Fortunately, we no longer need to prove the medium itself (internet advertising), but need to spend time educating the companies on social media. Seth Goldstein focused on the early stages of interactive advertising. He said that car companies helped drive the initial online advertising industry and the entertainment industry has been doing the same in social media. Seth used a recent campaign for the Incredible Hulk movie investing heavily in social media. For now, the entertainment and media companies will provide the initial liquidity. Brian Wieser, SVP of MAGNA Global was the naysayer on the panel. He believes that this isn’t a massive business because it doesn’t cost much to run campaigns currently. To contrast that, Steve Jang pointed to another example of a large brand investing in social media. While he couldn’t name the brand he had the opportunity to discuss advertising expenditures with that brand on the flight to NYC this morning. One other interesting topic was brought up by an audience member who asked: how do brands protect themselves when social media is mostly made up of unfiltered user generated content for the most part? I was actually surprised to hear the responses. Steve Jang said that imeem actually filters out content manually to ensure that ads aren’t displayed next to offensive content. While I don’t agree that this is an effective model for protecting brands I do agree with Steve when he reframed the discussion. He suggested that it is better to instead focus on advertising which is effective in a dynamic environment that has user generated content. He also emphasized that it is important that the company is able to segment the content effectively. One of the last questions asked to the panel was how can advertisers maintain their lifestyle when when CPMs are in the toilet. Seth Goldstein responded that the industry average CPMs should hopefully bounce off of penny CPMs and hopefully move up toward $1 and $2 CPMs over the next couple years. Jeremey Helfand thinks that the industry first needs to figure out what is being measured before the CPMs are increased. Overall the discussion was a lively one with a lot of discussion about where this is going. The overall consensus appeared to be that social media advertising is still in the early and experimental stages. While Brian Wieser doesn’t think that this will turn into a large industry, the majority of the other panelists seemed to disagree. |
| Posted: 23 Jun 2008 08:00 AM CDT
The event is only a one day event and as such I’ll be heading back to D.C. this evening. Hopefully I get some good content since I decided to wake up at 4 A.M. to head up to the city this morning! If you are at the event please come say hello. While not as big as the recent Graphing Social Patterns East event, this looks pretty great. One of the more interesting presentations comes from Peter Hobolt Jensen who is the Vice President of online communications at Lego. He will be discussing how the company has leveraged social media to expand their reach and valuable lessons learned. I hope to see you here. If you can’t make it, check in to this site to learn more about what’s going on! |
I’ll be spending the day in New York today to attend the | You are subscribed to email updates from The Social Times To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email Delivery powered by FeedBurner |
Inbox too full?  Subscribe to the feed version of The Social Times in a feed reader. | |
| If you prefer to unsubscribe via postal mail, write to: The Social Times, c/o FeedBurner, 20 W Kinzie, 9th Floor, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
No comments:
Post a Comment