Social advertising network Social Media thinks it has found a way to make online advertising more effective and less offensive by making it social. It may be doing exactly the opposite. Keep reading to find out more.
It's always interesting, when something I find groundbreaking is entrenched in something I don't really care for. Where I love the technology, but hate the vehicle. Yes, we are still talking about social networking, the new IPO multi-billion-dollar extravaganza buzz-word of the late 2000s, primarily based on advertising to keep costs down, and definitely, without question, always in your face.
So you know where I am coming from, when an adult asks me, "Do you have a MySpace page?" I laugh, and say, "What are you, 13 years old? No, I have real sites, meant for real purposes." Plus, I'm not very social anyway, which is a bit strange for a PR guy, but frankly I enjoy not leaving the house for days at a time. Today, for example, is day five. But I do like money, and the Internet is all about the money, so I like to keep up on new developments.
As we have all come to know, the advertising is not going away. So the real question is, what is the next step in quantifying this process? And the answer of course, is to streamline the process: ideally offering "wanted" or "relevant" information to a particular, and more to the point, specific demographic. Think about how many times you are pushed advertisements for things you would not even consider, like diapers for people without children, or pet food, for those with no pets.
Well, Social Media has a thought, and a product as well, ready to unveil called "Friendship Ranks." This advertising technology is based on analyzing and finding those people most popular on social networks, and using them to push ads and messages, using a type of "pass-it-along" technology. This type of technology is basically looking for the next Tela Tequila (MySpace legend), or other self-proclaimed Big Man on Internet (BMOI), that can stimulate commerce like wild fires. Social Media states their audience as being primarily between 18-34 years old, which I find to be a bit high. I might have guessed it to be between 8-16 years old myself, but maybe this is just more marketing speak, as data collection from children is always an extremely sensitive issue.
Social Media's FriendRank, a patent-pending algorithm, works very much like Google's PageRank, in evaluating social advertising banner placement, and determining not page popularity, but friendship popularity. By examining the relationship between how users surf within MySpace, Bebo or Facebook sites, Social Media is attempting to gauge around 100 of a user's closest relationships, and harness this information to deliver higher conversion rates on advertising, for advertisers.
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