TWITTER AND FACEBOOK MAKE THEIR CASE TO BRAND MARKETERS TO ADVERTISE ON THEIR SOCIAL SITES AT IAB'S MIXX CONFERENCE

09/29/2010

TWITTER AND FACEBOOK MAKE THEIR CASE TO BRAND MARKETERS TO ADVERTISE ON THEIR SOCIAL SITES AT IAB'S MIXX CONFERENCE

The chief operating officers for social media darlings Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. appeared Tuesday before roomfuls of marketers in New York with the following message: Seriously, folks, you should really start giving us your money.

Polished in business black and power heels, quite the contrast to Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg’s tendency towards hooded sweatshirts and casual footwear, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg submitted that the social network enables brands to do word-word-of-mouth marketing at massive scale. She made the case that marketing’s ethos is about connecting with people and Facebook is doing exactly that, making it the ideal vehicle to reach consumers.

“Brands have always talked to people, but on Facebook you can talk and listen,” Sandberg said, speaking at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s MIXX Conference, a gathering that draws marketers, ad agency executives and publishers to debate trends to shape the future of digital advertising. “This is the power of the social graph.”

She trotted out a roster of major brands – Chase, Nokia, Sephora and Toyota, for starters – that are rejoicing in the reach they can attain on Facebook. To illustrate the value of Facebook campaigns, she used Einstein Bros. Bagels’ decision earlier this year to offer free bagels to its Facebook fans, an initiative that helped the nationwide chain’s fan page skyrocket from 5,000 to more than 600,000, leading the company to its best week of sales for the year.

Sandberg’s message was clearly that advertising on Facebook is no longer experimental. To drive that point home, she mentioned Nielsen Co.’s announcement this week that it will measure audience data on Facebook, the way it measures television ratings.

Twitter’s Dick Costolo, speaking separately at the MIXX Conference, also had a confident message, noting that he sees Facebook as more of a partner in shifting ad dollars online than a competitor.

“We feel like we’ve cracked the code on a new type of advertising,” Costolo said.

Twitter currently has three ad products for its micro-publishing platform: Promoted Tweets, which raises the prominence of an individual post; Promoted Trends, which lets marketers place a promoted topic at the bottom of Twitter’s trending topics; and the soon-to-launch Promoted Accounts, which allows marketers to pay to be recommended to a relevant audience.

Industry watchers have devoted a fair amount of commentary toward how Twitter will monetize its massive network of about 200 million users. Costolo said the company still remains focused on building ad products that provide the best value to marketers and the community of users.

“We could accept millions of dollars from advertisers right now for short-term revenue, but we have no intention of doing that,” he said. “Monetization will fall out of engagement organically.”

While Twitter has mostly experimented with advertising with a small number of large brands, the company will debut next year a self-serve platform for anyone to buy advertising. He said the company’s EarlyBird experiment with daily deal tweets has been shelved to focus on other products.

“There’s a line out the door to advertise with us,” Costolo said.

COMMENTARY: Boy this all sounds like 'Promoted" propaganda for brand marketers to run advertising on Facebook and Twitter. "Okay, I got it now. Let's run some damn ads!"

Courtesy of an article dated September 28, 2010 appearing in The Wall Street Journal's Venture Capital Dispatch

Posted at 05:05 PM in Advertising and Promotions, Blogs and Online Microblogging, Consumers, Marketing and Promotions, Mobile Devices and Mobile Applications, Social Media and Social Networks | Permalink