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Flickr – Flickr is a photo sharing utility that was bought by Yahoo in 2005. While it’s most often used as an image hosting service, Flickr has various special interest groups related to products and media genres. There is also Statsr, a Flickr analytics tool. As other marketers crowd venues such as Instagram and Pinterest, Flickr represents a channel that isn’t on everyone’s lips so it represents a “stealth attack” channel to get to the audience you want to communicate with. For those with a budget for paid campaigns, Flickr sells its own internal banner and search ads.

Livejournal – While on the decline from its 2005 high, Livejournal is known for its many and varied genre media communities. If you’re marketing towards a specific genre segment (say, H.P. Lovecraft fans or crochet maniacs), Livejournal is a great place to place content. But be careful! Many of the folks who are still on LJ are there specifically to avoid traditional advertising.

Deviantart – This portfolio site is used by professional artists to display and promote their work. Much like Flickr, customers for narrowly targeted segments can be reached, especially for genre properties and various photography subfields. Deviantart doesn’t sell advertising; its main utility is as a passive marketing channel that can be used to spread the word concerning various media projects. Services like Bitly can be used to track clicks that take users off the site to yours.

MySpace – (Or, “I’m not dead yet.”) Having been knocked off of its pedestal by Facebook a long time ago, MySpace is still home to many music artists and indie film makers who want to promote their products. MySpace also offers its “My Ads” self-serve ad platform. Today, MySpace is more niche-like than its larger rival Facebook, providing a middle ground between the more mainstream platforms in terms of user base (30 million as of June 2011) and the smaller networks. MySpace also provides full analytics and behavioral targeting for its ads.

Quora – The most under-rated social network on this list, Quora does not bill itself as a social network, but as a user-created questions and answer site. Quora is renowned for its discussion-based communities and the wide reach of its members, and any plan that seeks to contact and make use of influencers should include Quora on its list of go to sites. Quora is not a place for paid media but instead is the home for earned media – it can be used alongside channels such as Twitter to place strongly written content and disseminate it amongst influencers who in turn will spread your content amongst their followers.

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While the big news lately has been all about the announcement of Facebook Home, Facebook Graph Search continues to be a subject of debate for search marketers. The basics of Graph Search have been known since Facebook’s January 15th announcement: it’s a new search utility within Facebook that allows for phrase-based searches that return results based on users’ relationships and activity. Graph Search queries can include such things as “photos of my friends before 1990” or “all pizza restaurants that my friends like within 10 miles”.

This new feature directly challenges Google-style keyword search marketing model and has strong implications for the future of PLAs and CSE’s. Graph Search creates a strong alternate channel of information for purchasers as they work to gather online information and reviews of products. For example, we often use our social media channels for information on products we’re interested in.

This behavior is anticipated by the way Graph Search works. Since one can construct searches such as “friends of mine who like Toshiba HDTV model xyz,” Graph Search will return results gathered from any mentions by the user’s friends in their timelines as well as traditional Bing! Search results. The actual search results are — so far — sketchy, but as more users use Graph Search and more brands participate, Graph Search could pose a major challenge to Google’s PLA model.

Simply put, Facebook is trying to eat Google’s lunch. Chris Winfield at Blue Glass Interactive agrees.

In his article, Winfield describes how Facebook is claiming that it is not competing with Google and even offers the possibility of future partnerships. I feel that this is simply PR baloney on Facebook’s part, as Bing web search results usually show up in most Graph Search queries. Winfield points out that Facebook will drop Bing like a hot potato if the situation on the ground changes, but my bet is that Facebook has too much invested with its current relationship with Microsoft. No, I feel that Graph Search is, amongst other things, a direct attack on the dominance of Google’s product listing ads.

Essentially, Facebook Graph Search takes normal keyword-based search (powered by Bing!) and wraps it up in strips of relationship-based insight that Graph Search mines from the Facebook user community. This adds another layer of creamy relevancy and enables ads to be better targeted towards buyers.

The drawbacks? In order for this to work, Facebook needs to have users like and feel comfortable with Graph Search, especially as a means to share review information on products and services. This is something that can’t even be promoted – it has to occur organically. If Facebook can cook this pot, then Facebook can offer placement in graph search results in a way similar to how Google sells paid search.

Graph Search will only be successful if it attracts a critical mass of users and if the search algorithm can detect enough meaningful data occurring within conversations about brands to be of use for advertisers. If this happens, Graph Seach could indeed become a viable alternative to traditional PLA’s — and a hefty new revenue stream for Facebook.

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The future of video content advertising is hanging on the precipice. Although the majority of video content advertising is produced for and sold in the traditional TV upfront advertising market, online video channels such as YouTube, Hulu, and Vimeo are attempting to break the network stranglehold on the $72 Billion TV advertising market. While digital video spending jumped 40% in 2012 to $3.1 Billion, it’s worth asking the question of whether it’s worth it for online advertisers to invest in the “newfronts” (the new term for digital upfronts, which are currently scheduled for May 2nd.)

As Nielsen will now be tracking data for online as well as traditional viewing via its Nielsen OCR product, the 2013 upfront season is now wide open for digital to complete with traditional TV. With the increased visibility offered by the new Nielsen data in regards to demographics, use of video ads presents new opportunities to use this new channel synergistically along with more conventional online marketing.

Right now, digital video represents a small piece of the pie, and the touting of the ‘Newfront’ format may seem to represent more of the continuing efforts of digital agencies to eat the lunch of traditional TV budgets. The original purpose for TV Upfronts was to take advantage of the long lead time required for television production, encouraging early purchase of advertising so as to both finance commercial production and to enhance the cash flows of agencies by early receipt of fees.

Due to the speed at which digital campaigns of varying formats can be carried out, the actual time lag of the traditional Upfront is no longer a factor. I feel that the Newfront is there more to make brands feel comfortable by replicating a 40-year old media buying process as opposed to representing any real need or necessary process.

What does this mean to you as an advertiser?

The question as to how the expanding space and inventory in the online video channel should be used is a difficult one. The outlook is clouded by issues such as the use of mobile devices while watching TV and the perception that video advertising, as used in channels such as Youtube, as more for branding instead of direct sales. However, the set top box, the PC, phones and tablets are merging. It’s becoming clearer and clearer that advertisers cannot simply rely heavily on PPC as they might have done in the past. The new landscape is demanding a mix of channels.

The good news is that it appears that conversion rates for branded video are drastically increasing. Advertisers would be foolish to not seek ad placement with shows and channels whose content resonates with their brand. Viewing great content is a way to prompt a customer to start his or her buying journey. Because cookies can be planted when a prospect clicks through from a video site and hits a landing page, online video ads are an ideal way to start the retargeting cycle and to get a customer into the sales funnel.

So while the Newfronts may seem to be a short-term, tactical move by agencies and online networks to take business away from their traditional TV counterparts, it’s in the long term a response to a changing media landscape driven by technological landscape. Brands must be able to navigate this complex new landscape or will fail to meet their objectives.

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Some recent findings show that image search traffic may have dropped up to 63% this past January. The reason for this decline seems to be a change in the way the Google search engine presents images to users selecting Image Search as an option. Prior to January, the sites containing images accessed through Image Search were loaded into the background; now they are not. Is this a good thing or not?  Traffic from Image Search isn’t targeted, or paid for — it’s just there. Google’s intention here is to better monetize PLA ads. There are three points you have to keep in mind…

Read more: http://bit.ly/11yAdOG

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A keyword-targeted ad system is a major step forward for Twitter, which is currently on track to make about half a billion dollars from advertising this year. The new system will be available to marketers through both the Twitter Ads UI and Twitter Ads API.

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Disasters — be they natural or human-made- — are an unpleasant but inevitable reality, and the disruptions of Hurricane Sandy brought home the lesson that organizations need to have policies and practices in place before the next one strikes. So how should organizations prepare? Mark Simon discusses 5 essential best practices for disaster-proofing your SEM campaign in this new article for the Business Marketing Association.

Read more:http://bit.ly/disasterproof

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