Posts Tagged ‘OMMA Social’

OMMA Social – San Francisco – 2009

Commenters create 70% of the dialogue in the exploding universe of the blogosphere, and are playing an increasingly important role in the evolution of social media. Blogs are evolving beyond sources of information into dynamic locations for Internet discourse. Commenters create the conversational elements on blogs, helping shape both blogger content and readers’ understanding. Major news sites have accepted this trend, and enable a commenter to reach a global audience by posting their comments after reporters’ articles published online. Marketers see comments as the “low hanging fruit” of social media marketing, and are using social media “participation” software to monitor blogosphere comments and post their responses without actually visiting the sites themselves.
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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.