RSS FeedArchive for the ‘Social Media’ Category

Its Back Against The Wall, Foursquare Prepares To Package Its Data

Dennis Crowley, Foursquare_edited-1After Foursquare and its CEO Dennis Crowley struggled for several months to cobble together this week's whopping $41 million funding round, the social check-in service is still getting heat over whether it will be able to draw revenue and maintain its high $800 million valuation.

While emails to Foursquare went unanswered about how it might advance its ad strategy -- which has been fairly limited in scope and placement to promotions from major marketers -- AdAge cited unidentified sources saying the social check-in service will roll out new behavioral targeting tools to ad networks, exchanges and agencies.

"We are always looking at ways that could make our data more useful for advertisers and partners, while respecting the privacy of our user's information," Foursquare said in a statement. By pulling out the most valuable part of its business after four years, Foursquare is betting that it can still keep its users checking in even if that sharing will mean more direct marketing from advertisers and retargeters.

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Shift Goes After Adobe, Salesforce.com With Open Marketing Cloud

ShiftNearly a year after launching a collaboration and productivity platform for marketers, Shift unveiled its Open Marketing Cloud, a suite of social promotions, media buying, community management, and analytics applications available through partnerships with 12 tech companies.

The Open Marketing Cloud brings together apps from the following firms: Aggregate Knowledge (media intelligence platform), Convertro (conversion-tracking), Curalate (Pinterest and Instagram analytics provider), Expion (social media management platform), Fan Appz (social media marketing personalization), Moontoast (social media ad creation), Offerpop (social media marketing campaign provider), Optimal Analytics (Facebook advertising and analytics provider), The Trade Desk (media buying platform), and GraphEffect (social ad management and analytics).

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Facebook's Next Mobile Phase: Deeper Connections, More Data

FB-HomeFacebook's first deep hardware integration is a custom version of the Android operating system, packaged on a new HTC smartphone called "HTC First."

“We didn’t want to build our own phone or an OS,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the press conference at Facebook's Menlo Park headquarters. “We want to provide the best experience for every person on every phone so we didn’t want to build an operating system that only some people could use.”

Unsurprisingly, no mention was made of the advertising opportunities that Facebook Home will offer, but as vendors have noted, as people spend more time using the social network’s features on mobile devices, Facebook gains significant new sources of data.

“OS level access will provide Facebook with a better understanding of their users around the clock,” Adelphic Mobile cofounder Jennifer Lum told AdExchanger earlier this week.  “Additional data could come from search, location and commuting patterns, payments, cross-app activity and lead to powerful targeting opportunities.”

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Ad Targeting Possibilities For A 'Facebook Phone'

FacebookOne question that's unlikely to be addressed during today's Facebook press conference has to do with the possible data tracking implications of a phone deeply integrated with Facebook's core features. But given Facebook's mobile ubiquity (More than 680 million people use Facebook on mobile devices every month) and CEO Mark Zuckerberg's focus on the mobile monetization challenge, it's a question worth asking.

One scenario, according to Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan, CEO of Drawbridge, a company that offers ad-targeting solutions, is that the "Facebook phone" could make Facebook Connect (a set of APIs that enable users to log onto websites and applications with their Facebook identity) more compelling to brands and app developers.

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Facebook Adds Adaptly To Strategic PMD Program

Nikhil Sethi, AdaptlyAdaptly, a company that aims to assist brands in increasing and understanding their “engagement” across social media, may now have greater ability to help its clients: The company is the 13th to be awarded Facebook's Strategic Preferred Marketing Developer title for the social net's exchange.

For Adaptly, being given the keys to the Facebook Exchange is a validation of its model. In an interview with AdExchanger last year, months before FBX even opened, CEO Nikhil Sethi explained why social media was quickly upending the traditional ways that marketers, agencies and media companies brought advertising to consumers.

As Sethi said last year, Facebook is "not a consumer entity. It’s a better version of a cookie. It’s replacing the cookie because it’s a much, much more accurate version of identity."

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ShareThis Acquires Socialize To Close The Revenue Loop Around Mobile And Social

kurt-abrahamsonSocial data analytics provider ShareThis has raised a $23 million third round and has wasted no time spending a chunk of that cash by purchasing Socialize.

Socialize creates tools for app developers who want additional social functions attached to their works. The point of the deal, details of which were undisclosed, is to give ShareThis a "unified platform" that incorporates desktop, mobile web browser and in-app experiences. Read the release.

"We’ve seen mobile sharing traffic double over the past year so there’s a massive opportunity to combine our deep knowledge of social audiences and the most engaging content to create truly compelling mobile ad executions," said ShareThis CEO Kurt Abrahamson, in a statement. "The acquisition of Socialize and our new round of funding will accelerate our efforts to deliver an enhanced digital advertising solution for brands, content optimization offerings for publishers and of course, the choice and flexibility consumers want in sharing content that moves them."

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Information Builders Goes After CMOs With Integrated Social Analytics

Information-BuildersInformation Builders, a 38-year-old business intelligence and analytics provider that serves customers like Ford, Mastercard, Lockheed Martin, and Verizon, is setting its sights on the CMO. The New York City-based company yesterday launched its WebFocus Social Media Analytics platform, designed to provide insight into customer sentiment on social networks.

“We were originally very IT-driven but we’re going to hit the CMO as readily as we’ve hit the CIO in the past,” Information Builders president Michael Corcoran told AdExchanger. “We’re branching out because the customer is branching out and there’s a real demand for intelligence around customer interactions.”

Launched at the Gartner Business Intelligence and Analytics Summit in Texas, the Social Media Analytics solution allows users to conduct sentiment analysis on Twitter and Facebook messages and blog posts, track patterns across channels, geographies, customers and other categories, and build interactive reports and dashboards showing data correlations.

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How E-Commerce Incubator Rocket Internet Ramped Up On Facebook Exchange

luis-hanemann-rocket-internetBerlin-based Rocket Internet incubates e-commerce startups in markets outside the US, running them first as closely held businesses and then encouraging greater autonomy of operations and marketing in advance of a potential sale. As such the company is a big proponent of retargeting and was an early adopter of Facebook's ad exchange.

The company leaped into FBX immediately after the RTB platform launched officially last fall, and now works closely with FBX specialist Triggit across many of its brands. Rocket Internet's Chief Marketing Officer Luis Hanemann recently spoke in depth with AdExchanger about its display ad strategy and how FBX fits in.

"For us Facebook Exchange is mainly about reach," he said. "But there are many areas for improvement. A question we ask Facebook is, will there be the possibility of using data they have as well? Right now there's no interconnection of FBX with information Facebook has about its users. That's interesting."

Back Story

Rocket Internet was founded by the German brothers Oliver, Marc, and Alexander Samwer. Among its ventures are European shoe e-tailer Zalando; Foodpanda, a food delivery service focused on Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia; Russian fashion e-retailer lamoda; and many others. Its exits have included Tradoria (sold to Rakuten), Jamba (sold to Verisign/News Corp), and Alando (sold to eBay).

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Compass Labs Focuses on Social Intelligence and Audience Segmentation

dilip-compasslabsFacebook PMD partner Compass Labs launched in 2009 to serve the then nascent social marketing space. Today the company incorporates real-time marketing intelligence into its products.

"We call ourselves a 'proficient listening platform,'" Compass Labs CEO Dilip Venkatachari told AdExchanger. "We started with our capability to identify audience segments and we developed the ability to bring together all of the social information and go beyond broad trending topics to a specific audience segment... and try to extract what is going on in their minds based on social media interactions."

Venkatachari spoke with AdExchanger about the company's Ads Manager and Social Intelligence products, the changes happening with Facebook's PMD program, and how mobile will impact the company's growth.

Can you tell us more about the CLIQ Ads Manager and CLIQ Social Intelligence?

We built a set of algorithms that make it possible, with predictive analytics, to mine the social graph and social analytics to see what people are doing right now and how that relates to a specific brand. The two products share the same heritage but they solve slightly different problems.

CLIQ Ad Manager is a product that lets advertisers use our platform to identify and reach specific and unique audiences in an optimal manner. It comes with its own measurement and optimization tools. We measure impressions so we can understand what kinds of audiences are more apt to convert at a certain time. And we apply all of that to each campaign.

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GroupM's Norman To NY Times: So, You're In The Ad Tech Business Now?

Zimbalist at 4asThe old thinking: social media channels like Facebook and Twitter will be the death knell of traditional publishers.

The new thinking: they need each other desperately. And just maybe, they can actually generate a worthwhile amount of ad dollars and audience engagement through mutual benefit.

That was the consensus at the opening panel of the final day of the 4A's Transformation: The Idea Effect conference in New Orleans, which also delivered a bit of news, by way of Rob Norman, Chief Digital Officer, GroupM. Norman introduced Michael Zimbalist, the NYTCo's VP, research & development operations, by asking, "So, you're in the ad tech business now?"

Well, not quite, but The NYTCo did just add Condé Nast's 26 magazine and digital properties, including Vanity Fair, GQ, Epicurious and others, along with Time Inc.'s People Digital, Forbes and Advertising Age to its Ricochet contextual advertising system. (See today's release.)

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