Bermel Interactive

Salesforce.com is a cloud computing company with a customer base of 70,000 across myriad of industries and geographies. They held an annual conference this past week in San Francisco – optimistically named Dreamforce – that boasted a staggering 19,000 attendees.

During the keynote, the company announced Chatter, a social platform that includes profiles, status updates with real time activity feeds from it’s customer relationship management software and integration with Facebook and Twitter.

I typically don’t spend much time thinking about enterprise apps, but this is interesting because, though it’s not the first to talk about bringing social networking for business use into a secure enterprise environment, the size and clout of salesforce.com is enough to warrant significant attention. At a time when it seems every company is asking how do I integrate social media marketing, here is Salesforce saying, we’ll change the way business works.

That said, the company was exceptionally careful to refer to Chatter as a collaboration tool rather than a social media capability, as Ian Lamont’s blog for CIO pointed out. CEO Mark Benioff says the choice of words is all about accessing pursestrings, rather than avoiding social media terminology.

“We really want to talk about collaboration, because that really is a budget item for our customers,” Benioff said.

Until the product rolls out, we won’t know if it’s primarily a collaboration tool for sharing business documents with some light social features, or truly a social networking tool with some enterprise features. Whether Salesforce refers to it as enterprise social, realtime enterprise, social collaboration, or any other combination, it doesn’t matter.

Certainly, as Enterprise Irregulars so rightly pointed out in their post, the product announcement won’t address the cultural issues that hamper adoption of social networking. Even so, I believe the announcement pushes the conversation about the need to integrate and adopt social networking forward. CMOs and marketing departments wrestling with how to roll out and integrate social media marketing have another example to point to, and depending on the success of the rollout, potentially many more internal advocates to champion the cause.

That’s my take. What’s yours?

The flood of news and information about marketing today is voluminous, making it challenging to
keep up and on top of everything. I do 3 things in an effort to stay abreast of what is going on:

Subscribe to weekly summaries to know what is happening in marketing. My two favorites are:

1) Mediapost has online roundup of daily news, and the ability to subscribe to specific topics such as search, email, video, gaming, metrics, social media.

2) Smartbrief provides succinct excerpts on a variety of industries. I subscribe to the IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) Smart brief as well as Smartbrief on Social Media.

Read business books for a deeper understanding of new marketing approaches.

Do so with the following discipline: On the inside front cover, write a 1-line summary for each chapter. On the inside back cover, jot down the quoteable quotes you might want to use later with the page number on which they appeared. I can’t take credit for this as it comes from Tim Sanders, author of Love is the Killer App. It’s time consuming, but if, like me, you’re apt to remember something if you write it down, it’s very helpful. I haven’t read Crush It by entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk, but that’s next on the list. (Click on the link only if you want to read a review.)

Attend online webinars to learn how to apply new marketing approaches. Aural learning is a nice break from reading, and there are a ton of online webinars available. If it’s social media you’re learning about, Awareness Networks has a terrific series featuring thought leaders in social media. Hubspot, another Boston-based company also offers a series of webinars including a program called Inbound University, a series of webinars that culminate in an Inbound Marketing designation for those who achieve the 75% minimum score. Read more…

By Mary Bermel

While search boasts a better reputation and social media marketing is the industry darling, the $8B worth of spent on display advertising in 2008 is hardly chump change. (In fact, how many bloggers are now happily collecting monthly paychecks thanks to profitable display campaigns running on their sites?) In 2008, 70% of ad spend went directly to web sites, 30% to ad networks. According to some, the split could be 50:50 in 2009.

Here’s a drastically simplified of overview of the evolution to ad networks.

Early days – approximately 1994 to 2000

Simple placements based on content relevance: Car ads on car sites. Ads oriented to the C-Suite on WSJ.com. Personal technology ads on tech-oriented sites like CNET.com

Pricing, though a fraction of offline CPMs, ranged in the mid-teens, though some niche sites command rates in the $100 CPM range before savvy media buyers negotiated healthy discounts.

As the web exploded, planning campaigns became unwieldy. Sure, the portals offer tremendous reach, but gee, smaller sites stood out, pitching and proving themselves with creative flexibility and helpfulness. The number of sites considered for a single campaign swelled. Agencies struggled to sort through and evaluate all the options, never mind deal with operational issues, and clients were sometimes bewildered by too much choice.

Enter the ad networks, connecting multiple sites – literally hundreds, in some cases – that want to sell ad space with advertisers and agencies. Their pool includes the long tail of sites, as well large branded websites who saw that representation would help them sell what their direct sellers had not. Ad networks structured their sites into logical vertical groups (tech, finance, auto, health) enabling advertisers to place their ads in contextually relevant places.

Today, ad networks while maligned by the WSJ, are a standard component of most media plans. Here’s why:

Advantages of ad networks:

Scale. Reach rivals the largest web properties. Ad network Specific Media claims 160 million U.S. consumers monthly across multiple vertical categories. Netshelter, a vertical ad network for tech has 20 million unique U.S. visitors, per ComScore.

Fraction of the price of the most prominent pages on leading web properties. Less than $1 CPM in some cases.

Flexible pricing models giving a pay-for-performance option via cost per lead, cost per action in addition to cost per thousand.

Technology leadership. Niche audiences can be reached in large numbers, thanks to technologies that segment audiences and allow marketers to target them e.g. Early Tech Adopters, Business Travellers, Women. This gives marketers the opportunity to deliver truly relevant ads to the most-likely-to-be-receptive consumer. It’s no longer a ‘spray and pray’ game.

Service. Ad networks have led the way in optimization, letting advertisers refine which ads run where.

Limitations typically associated with ad networks are starting to fade:

Disclosure. Some won’t tell advertisers where their ads are running. The best offer complete transparency. The exceptional let you exclude sites from your plan.

Quality. More and more networks do a better job screening sites on the network and selecting quality. Once all ad networks were considered ‘remnant’ inventory. Today many highlight key brands on their rosters. In fact, in Jan 09, the New York Times suggested as much as 50% of their ad space might be sold through networks.

Net, net, ad networks are here to stay, alongside a myriad of well known and much loved branded websites.

Next up: More on the size and choice among vertical ad networks like Netshelter for tech, Glam for women, Travel Ad Network for travel. Behavioral targeting. Optimization. Real time bidding. So much more to talk about.