I love LinkedIn.  And I’ve been watching it grow in breadth and depth – lots of new apps and sophistication and members in the last 6 mos or so.  They just raised another round of capital, and I can’t wait to see what they will do with it. Steve Patrizi, their director of ad sales will be speaking at the Morning Forum on Web 2.0 that we are producing in conjunction with the SVAMA.  Here are the details if you are interested in attending:

The June meeting: The Business Side of Social Networking

Social media is booming in the business world and is changing the way that professionals manage their own brand, discover business solutions and opportunities, and find and recruit employees.  Learn how to use this emerging platform to optimize your own professional success and to help your company reach and connect with affluent and influential business people.

Steve Patrizi, Director of Advertising Sales, LinkedIn

Steve runs advertising sales and operations for LinkedIn. Prior to joining LinkedIn in September of 2007, Steve managed advertising sales teams at Microsoft’s MSN division and held various sales management positions at the print and online editions of The Wall Street Journal. 

June 25^th, 8:30am-10am

Scott’s Seafood Restaurant and Grill

855 El Camino Real

Town and Country Shopping Center (Embarcadero and El Camino)

Palo Alto, CA 94301  /  (650) 323-1555

Cost: Currently $5 to SVAMA members, $15 for non-members

Click here to register.

My husband will say, when he has geeked out too much and spent too much time in front of his laptop, that he needs “wetwear” [he prefers "wetware"] — real live people; frequently our kids will fill the bill.  This started when they were infants and wet in more ways than one, usually.  I’m beginning to feel that I need a more major dose of wetwear daily.  As I spend more and  more time tending to business online, keeping up with Social Networks and Twitter and all the rest, and checking my crackberry through out the day and night.  It wears!

Have you found Beach Walks with Rox yet?  It’s a daily vcast offering “a little bit of Aloha daily”.  Very soothing.  But as low key as she seems, she is totally plugged in to all that is Web 2.0 and is very smart cookie.   She has a great post on keeping your personality, and even having more if it.  I’m all for that especially in the business setting.  As I get older, I have less and less patience with performing to some standard other than my own at that moment.  Age does have it’s benefits.

Beach Walk 647 – Transparency and Privacy

Two BT related products have recently appeared on my radar – one just launching this month, the other has been around since 2004, but in stealth mode, and is coming to market formally now.

US-based online marketing company ValueClick Media will launch a platform in the summer offering advertisers behavioral targeting based on predictive analytics, according to a presentation it made at Hollywood OMMA on March 18.

Once again my direct response antennae were raised having spent years in predictive modeling strategies for circulation plans with traditional catalog clients. I wondered if that concept had morphed into the online world, and if so, how.

I called Tony Winders, the VP of Marketing for ValueClick Media to get a better understanding of their new offer. Tony was a tad cagey (delightful, but cagey), since they have not officially launched yet, but was able to give me a bit more detail about the beta.  The conversation also touched on privacy issues (of course), the consumer’s lack of understanding of cookies, the need for guidelines and on and on. We had a lot to talk about.

Until now, BT methodologies have fallen into one of three flavors: retargeting, clusters, or custom business rules. Retargeting is the most effective form of BT because it targets individuals who have already interacted with a brand. Clusters assign each visitor to only one group and custom business rules give a high degree of control to marketers, but both rely on human interpretation of data to determine how a visitor will be classified. ValueClick Media hopes to popularize a new, predictive approach to BT by allowing its technology to automatically determine to what category each visitor belongs.

ValueClick Medias’ algorithm takes into consideration the observed behavior of visitors and creates predictive models for future behavior – all based on attributes provided by anonymous cookie data, not personally identifiable information. The resulting profile data defines each visitor as belonging to one or more categories (mobile, finance, retail/shopper, travel/air, etc.) ValueClick Media can then leverage their extensive inventory (over 130 million unique visitors per month) to give advertisers large scale potential per category – something a smaller ad network would not be able to supply.

Another product, called ACerno, has been in stealth mode for almost 4 years.  The concept borrows heavily from the blind Cooperative databases that catalogers have been using for over a decade. In fact, ACerno is a wholly owned subsidiary of  i-Behavior, one of the major coops.

aCerno collects anonymous information from an association of more than 375 major online multi-channel retail web sites that are not identified to each other, representing 140 million shoppers,. The information is completely private and only tagged with an ID, with no cross-reference to personal information. aCerno compiles this anonymous data using cookies.

aCerno’s analytics provide two exclusive tracks of predictive information:

·        Who the customers are – knowing what a person shops for correlates strongly to who they are; e.g., someone who buys a dress and a crib is almost certainly a woman with a baby

·        What customers will buy next – large populations with similar patterns of purchase behavior can be discovered and sold

aCerno clients’ best prospects are identified with modeling and profiling techniques, finding users that look most similar to their best customers. Once these high-value prospects are recognized, aCerno uses its massive advertising network to deliver targeted advertising messages directly to them, creating brand consideration or incremental transactions, which can be purchased on a CPA basis

aCerno’s extensive network of high-quality websites, web publishers and portals is targeted exclusively at the cookie level with banner ads and rich media to achieve maximum reach against the target audience. The network reaches over 95% of the Internet population with 80+% of the impressions being served into sites on the ComScore Top 500.

This is predictive analysis – scoring million of cookies against hundreds of variables to create models.  The concept was so successful to catalog mailers that it became the vast majority of their prospecting efforts and budgets, replacing the us of individual rented mailing lists ultimately.  The same may be true for retailers going forward, using custom models of their customer, that can change per promo, or over time, and using those as selection criteria for branding efforts or to drive traffic to a store.

Both companies are extremely sensitive to the privacy concerns that my surface regarding their products, and have gone to great lengths issue very thorough privacy statements as well as educating both the consumer (about cookies) and their publishers/website owners about the concept of modeling with cookies.  Ultimately, the success of either product will be a combination of results, and the willingness of consumers to allow the use of cookies to be used to better targeted offers.

I’ve fallen in love with podcasts.  I usually have my iPod shuffle glued to my ears while working out, and I have recently discovered the business section of iTunes (duh, where have I been?).  Rather than be overwhelmed by e-newsletters in my inbox, and print pubs that I don’t have time to read, piling up on my desk, I can instead absorb great info in what usually would be downtime.  Good stuff. So, I’m currently addicted to DishyMix, from Personal Life Media. Susan Bratton, an industry legend in her own right, hosts weekly interviews with online media execs, moguls, interesting people and legends. Recent episodes have included Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak; Wenda Harris Millard, President of Media for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia; and many others. Suz’s questions are great and range from industry trends and perspectives to the silly/fun – predictions for 2008 food trends, personal stories etc. I came across PLM while doing a Web 2.0 media plan for a client and spent some time on the phone with Suz to flesh out the opportunites. This podcast network is really done right. There are multiple shows on a variety of related topics, all with weekly podcasts, blogs, and Web pages with transcripts posted on the PLM site, along with a blogs for each show and additional content. The advertising opportunities are many and varied. This is a real find, from the perspectives of a happy consumer or an advertiser.

We will be conducting a monthly breakfast meeting on Web 2.0 beginning Wed. Feb 27, at Scott’s in Palo Alto, CA.  The topics and format will change monthly, but will always have a focus on emerging media.  If you know of anyone who might be interested in speaking, please contact us. More on the meetings here.  Hope you can join us!