Automatically tailored display ads could attract small businesses

Advertising has been a killer Internet business model, making billions of dollars for Google and others. But a number of startup companies think there’s a huge untapped market in providing automatically tailored display advertising to thousands of local businesses.

Ad slot: PlaceLocal automatically generates ads for local businesses by crawling the Web. Credit: PaperG

Yelp, which aggregates customer reviews of local businesses, has tried to provide targeted local advertising with varied success. Now a new crop of startups are hatching plans to provide more effective advertising services to local businesses. The aim is to ease small businesses into online advertising through familiar channels such as newspaper sites, and to help these locally focused websites increase revenues by making it easier for them to service small accounts.

“There’s a lot of overhead to service small advertisers,” says Roger Lee, chief operating officer of PaperG, an advertising company whose customers include the Boston Globe, the Houston Chronicle, and Newsday. Most local businesses don’t have the budget to pay an advertising agency to design ads for them, he explains. And it isn’t cost-effective for newspapers to offer ad design services for accounts below a certain size. Lee, formerly the publisher of the Harvard Crimson, Harvard University’s student newspaper, says his company wanted to find a way to use technology to fill this missing link between local businesses and local newspapers.

PaperG is testing a software system called PlaceLocal that automatically generates ads for local businesses by crawling the Web. The system scrapes the Web for basic information about a business such as its address, phone number, and opening hours. Even if the business doesn’t have its own Web page, data can often be pulled from third-party services such as Yelp or Google Maps. The system then uses semantic analysis to find and extract photos and positive reviews, and it builds an ad automatically using Adobe’s Flash software. The business owner or newspaper ad sales representative can customize the ad, so if PlaceLocal didn’t choose the best photo or review, it’s easy to select another. Read more

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Do blogs and tweets help a company’s bottom line? One startup thinks it has the answer.

In retrospect, 2009 may be viewed as the year “social media” came of age: Facebook passed 350 million active users, Oprah made Twitter mainstream, and LinkedIn introduced a service to help recruiting agencies search the site for job candidates. But using microblogs, photoblogs, user-generated content, and even traditional blogs to interact with customers takes time and money, and some companies still question whether all that effort is doing them any good. So how does a company not only measure the results of its social media efforts but also effectively manage them?

Early in December, Social Agency, a five-person startup based in Austin, TX, launched a Web-based software package called Spredfast that helps companies manage their social media campaigns. The software not only measures audience size and engagement but also allows coordinated planning and automated posting across multiple social media platforms.

Specifically, the Web-based software counts how many people view a company’s Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr updates, as well as posts managed by several popular blogging platforms, such as Moveable Type, WordPress, Blogger, Lotus Live, and Drupal. It also measures how the audience is interacting with all this content–for instance, how much they are commenting on posts, clicking on links, or retweeting updates.

The goal, says Social Agency cofounder Scott McCaskill, is to let companies see “whether all the time put into doing those things is really helping build brand or product awareness, which kinds of content are most successful, what days and even times of day result in the most traffic or new followers/friends.”

A free version allows a company to manage a single identity or “voice” across each platform. Paid versions let companies coordinate multiple users and voices, and provide a longer data history. McCaskill says the software has had the most success with units of large companies and marketing agencies.

Spredfast gives companies a way to plan and manage content deployment. For instance, users can write blog entries, tweets, or Facebook updates ahead of time and then schedule when they will be posted. A store that might offer an online coupon code or one-day sale could, with Spredfast, have Twitter push that code out several times a day to increase the number of site visitors. The software’s metrics, McCaskill says, let marketers figure out the best times to post updates. Spredfast also makes it easy for them to test different strategies.

The company launched a year ago as a maker of custom Facebook applications. When Facebook redesigned its home page, says McCaskill, Social Agency’s business model was effectively torpedoed. As part of its sales strategy, the company had spent a lot of time helping clients plan their social media strategies. So the founders retooled and used their expertise to start building Spredfast about nine months ago. The software launched in private beta in September, public beta in October, and had its “official” launch on December 2.

Social Agency plans to introduce a feature by the end of January that will help users design a social media campaign based on their objectives. McCaskill says that Spredfast will most likely present users with a list of common marketing goals that they can check off. The software will suggest a template for a campaign based on what’s worked best for clients with similar goals.

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/web/24283/page2/

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Twitter Updates Usage Policy, Still Open to Ads

Microblogging firm says it’s still considering an ad-based revenue model, but looks to its users to steer the evolution of the service.

By Kenneth Corbin:

With usage soaring and third-party apps on the rise, Twitter has updated its terms of service to reflect the new ways people are using the service.

The company may have also provided a glimpse into its plans to edge toward profitability, with co-founder Biz Stone noting that the policy change does not rule out an ad-based revenue model.

“In the terms, we leave the door open for advertising,” Stone said in a blog post. “We’d like to keep our options open.”

He referred to comments he’d made previously about Twitter’s views on advertising and prospective business models, saying that Twitter is not categorically opposed to advertising, only that the idea of throwing banner ads up on people’s profile pages “isn’t interesting to us.”

Twitter is also looking into the idea of charging for commercial services as it works to develop a business model.

Stone also addressed the issue of ownership, which has been the source of occasional controversy in the world of Web-hosted user-generated content. Facebook ran into a privacy snarl when it updated its usage agreement in a way that appeared to assert perpetual ownership of users’ data, even after an account was closed.

Facebook quickly recanted and modified its policy, and has since made a series of overtures to its privacy-conscious users and policy makers.

Stone made it plain that Twitter has no intention of going down a similar path.

“Twitter is allowed to ‘use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute’ your tweets because that’s what we do,” he said. “However, they are your tweets and they belong to you.”

Stone said the update to the usage agreement was necessitated by the site’s ongoing evolution, aimed to “more appropriately reflect the nature of Twitter.”

What exactly that nature is is a slippery question. At a conference in Washington earlier this week, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey participated in a panel discussion where he was asked how he would define what that company does.

“I would consider us a utility,” Dorsey said. “We are building something that is equivalent to a grid.”

Dorsey’s view is that Twitter itself is a piece of infrastructure, like the electric grid or the Internet, where the real innovation comes from the devices and applications that are put to use on top of the network.

In that sense, Twitter’s evolution rests largely on its API, where third-party developers are invited to apply Twitter’s basic functionality to build off-site applications.

“Where we’re going is where the users take us,” he said.

Source: http://www.internetnews.com/webcontent/article.php/3838746/Twitter+Updates+Usage+Policy+Still+Open+to+Ads.htm

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Big growing even bigger: Mobile Advertising and Internet Advertising

By Sanjay Sharma,
Advertisers these days have many options for advertising, but Mobile Advertising and Internet Advertising are the two most thrilling, as advertisements look very attractive when displayed on phone screens and on computer/laptop screens. Since much potential and scope lies in mobile and Internet advertising and it tends to deeply appeal to the viewers. Mobile Advertisement and Internet Advertisements have come in focus.

Mobile Advertising is closely related to online or Internet Advertising, though its reach is far greater – mobile advertising’s estimated targets say that by end 2008, there would be global total 4 billion. Global estimates of computers, including desktops and laptops, is at 800 million. Therefore exclusive advertising on web pages meant for access by mobile phones is a great idea.

It would be easier for an advertiser to convince people to buy their product when people would receive and view ads while there are already out for shopping. Giving them the relevant information needed can do this and supplying them with added details could also influence them to the extent that they straightaway proceed to buy product after seeing its ads. In these kind of situations, Mobile Advertising can be most beneficial.

As essential needs of all humans are very similar, a person who has received an advertisement through Mobile or Internet may not be in need of the service or product advertised but might know someone who is in need of it and so can pass on the advertiser’s message through word of mouth, forwarding the link or the advertisement. A major benefit of Internet Advertising is that the information and content can be accessed in any country even at late odd hours. Internet Advertisements are often interactive advertising so if the Internet Advertiser opts for a response, the viewer may like to visit the brand’s website, or try to contact them through email, phone, etc.

For mobile marketers Mobile Advertising or Internet Advertising is something already so big, a still growing market with open places that they could fill in. Mobile advertisement becomes in this way closer than ever. A major result of Internet advertising is information and content that is not limited by geography or time. The rising area of interactive advertising presents fresh and innovative challenges for advertisers who have until now adopted an interruptive strategy. Mobile Advertising and Internet Advertising in future are predicted to become the major sources of advertising.

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