I’m now seeking input on the best way or apps for aggregating posting on all of my Social Networks – its taking way too much time to do it individualy.  I’d welcome any and all suggestion.

Currently I’m looking at Friendfeed and Ping.fm.  any feedback on either?

And Twitter is driving me nuts…but I’m not alone.  Many tweets and blog posts are referencing the many ups and downs of the Twitter servers.  Clearly they have maxed out their capacity.

For those of us who have been frenzied,(well ok challenged is bit more sedate) at the daunting task of staying on top of the many blogs and social networks that are of interest, I have glimpsed a solution.  I just had the  most amazing demo of a new program/web app from eCairn today from the CEO Dominique Lahaix   As I look through the verbiage on their site, it really doesn’t do justice to what they are all about.  They are currently in, if not stealth, then beta mode, and are completing modules and build-outs at a rapid clip, so the marketing copy is not keeping up.  

Their application falls into 2 camps

“Conversation” application – Makes it easy for an individual or group to identify, track, learn and engage communities.  The user driven menu allows for easy blog search, blog monitoring and clipping capabilities to build a bloglist for any purpose – or multiple purposes, from personal to Marketing/Enterprise driven objectives.  It would be take time but the user could easily compile a list of several hundred blogs using this program.  Ecairn will also provide back end solutions to compile a blog list in the thousands of blogs.  The list is organized so that recent posts, filtering, linking to the blog for a comment, and then coming back to eCairm to annotate the action.  Reporting capabilities are (or will be) available to note what actions were taken where and when.  The abiltiy to link to social networks along with the blogs, and seemlessly shift between the two without losing track of the process if fantastic.  A starred list can be used to monitor the most favorite or trafficked blogs.

 The second application is for advertising in the blogosphere and Social networks.  A similar list can be compiled of blogs, feeds and SN’s that accept advertising – with the ability to view rankings, rates and make comparisons.  I’m not sure if you can place ads from within the application, but it seemed like you could do everything else.

 I’m excited as a media agency owner helping our clients map out Web 2.0 strategies, and as a Web 2.0 junkie.  There’s hope! 

“It’s the data, stupid”, might well be the mantra of the direct response industry.  Or a corollary “database segmentation and analysis is the key to ROI”.  Much of the analytical methodology and discipline is now popping up with a variety of BT products and solutions.

I spent quite a bit of time talking to a variety of Ad Networks, publishers and other suppliers around what’s new in BT during Ad-Tech in San Francisco in April.  I may sound like a broken record, but I continue to be astounded at how much the methodology behind many of the new targeting solutions are firmly based in direct marketing, data-driven practices now moving in to the online space. Utilizing techniques of working with anticipated click streams to predict future behavior, as opposed to merely measuring past behavior, the level of sophistication is rising.  Good news for the advertiser! 

I met with Don Mathis, president of Epic Advertising (previously known as Azoogle, plus an acquisition or two) to discuss how they have using BT and some upcoming changes.  Epic Advertising now encompasses two main units focused on online consumer traffic acquisition: AzoogleAds and Bazaar Advertising. AzoogleAds continues to provide broad-based traffic acquisition services leveraging the company’s leading performance-based ad network business. Bazaar Advertising continues to provide search engine management and marketing services, specializing in keyword discovery, purchase and optimization of online search campaigns.

While the company had previously offered a robust, classic BT solution to it’s advertisers, just this week, they are announcing the official launch of Performance CPM (pCPM), a patent-pending metric that allows advertisers to track performance-marketing campaigns by measuring “induced visits.” Advertisers can now determine campaign effectiveness utilizing a new, more comprehensive approach and gives a new definition to the concept of “behavioral”. 

 The premise of pCPM is rooted in induced visits, or visits to an advertiser’s site tracked beyond direct clicks.  A visit to an advertiser’s site is “induced” if it results in any way from an ad, even if there is no immediate response or direct click path from ad to site.  This metric goes beyond traditional campaign measurement tactics by employing scientific techniques to discern the broadest types of cause and effect, excluding things like “accidental clicks.” I was intrigued with Bill’s further explanation of “induced visit”:An “induced visit” from an ad is any visit that can be statistically linked to viewing the ad.  Because it is statistical, you can’t just have one induced visit; you have to look at lots of ad-views, and lots of site visits, and then do some careful correlations to discover how many more site visits you got with the ads – than you would have had without them. The math behind the metric is just subtle enough that others aren’t doing it, but it’s actually fairly simple, and has been used in signal processing and neurobiology for decades.  Along with measuring induced visits, the metric encompasses elements from traditional tracking methods – CPC, CPM and CPA – as well as inherent branding impacts to offer a more holistic view of an online advertising campaign’s success.  Because pCPM involves only statistics, it avoids any retention of Personally Identifiable Information (PII).    The ability of the advertiser to use these new metrics to increase performance of their BT campaigns will only increase their effectiveness in optimization. Don stated, “This method lets our advertisers do two new things:  they can see the impact of an ad beyond direct clicks, and they can put a solid measure of user-impact on their traditional brand-oriented CPM campaigns. We believe our method, marrying marketing and technology, is the next step in online marketing campaign tracking and will serve as a model for the industry. ” It all started to sound like smoke and mirrors until I spent additional time talking to Bill Softky, their “Chief Algorithm Officer”.  His academic background is in brain science and pattern recognition, and his mathematical work on neural irregularity and correlations is intimately related to the statistics of online advertising traffic. 

 Another company that offers a very sophisticated behind the scenes approach to BT (they refer to it as “dynamic” marketing) is Collarity which is actually a behavioral platform that optimizes content and ad targeting and is utilized by major publishers on the back end.   I spent some time talking to Deborah Richman, SVP Marketing and Business Development:

“We’re undergoing a revolution in behavioral targeting because it won’t take so much work to target anymore.  Publishers and advertisers spend a lot of time categorizing and defining content.  With behavioral platforms like Collarity, all people visiting a site can dynamically and effortlessly define what’s interesting instead.  This drives far better targeting from the existing ad inventories.  In fact, this will be necessary if ad targeting is to work and effectively monetize social and multimedia content today.” 

Current behavioral ad targeting is based on pre-set categories or segments, whether demographics, interests or site subject matter.  Targeting occurs when sites/destinations identify content based on what is mapped to these attributes.  Targeting also occurs when people are directly identified or tagged based on where they have visited.  One of the down sides is that some portion of visitors are targeted while others are not  

Current contextual ad targeting can vary based on the content on each page, as well as categories set by publishers.  Visitors will see the different ads on different content pages.  The ads are shown based on words on the pages.  Multimedia content and ads are depending on keywords tagged to them  

Several problems that Collarity’s behavioral platform addresses are that it applies to every visitor anonymously, without tagging them.  It dynamically targets ads, based on evolving content and interests.  Each visitor sees different ads as they click around and are “joined to” communities of interest. Much higher consumption and satisfaction for visitors, with ads that seem more relevant.

While this is once again in danger of falling into the smoke and mirrors genre, it really does not, once you look behind the scenes.  Publishers using Collarity harness 100% of all visitor click streams, anonymously.  These include content and ad consumption of all types – which is a significant statement given the explosion of social networks and CGM based sites now.  Community segments form based on intensity (rather than popularity) of interests.  Based on these dynamic segments, both content and ads are show to visitors 

A bit more detail: They optimize text, banner and video ads, relying on ad inventories and feeds used by a publisher.  They can deliver the most relevant ads, which typically doubles consumption of ads.  Ad buyers can see these dynamic profiles from publishersGenerally, they experience far better results from dynamic targeting and the Publishers end up selling more impressions and later higher CPMs;   

The common theme between the two companies is the ability to tap into the nuances of intuited or induced behavior to predict future performance. As we as an industry become more expert and rigorous in our technological capabilities, we all will benefit with far more relevant ads, less ad budget waste and happier end users.  What’s not to like?