Gasta News :socialmedian election widget

Help us test the socialmedian election widget
By Jason Goldberg on October 28, 2008 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
socialmedian blog readers: I wanted to provide you with a first look at http://election.socialmedian.com, a site we are launching with the Washington Post and other partners like The Guardian to help people track and participate in election 2008 coverage.



We will formally announce the new site tomorrow (Wednesday)...you can use it now but it is still a work in progress.

The http://election.socialmedian.com site aggregates news and user-feeds related to the election and enables users to join in the election coverage and discussion. We created this site with The Washington Post to enable people to track all the election news from thousands of news sources as well as from Twitter feeds, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, and more all in one place, and (importantly) to join-in and add their own feeds from their favorite sites to provide user reports leading up to and on election day.

You can sign up for the page immediately and add your feeds. Add your Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, blog site etc. and we'll automatically add your relevant contributions on those sites to this page.

Starting Wednesday users will also be able to eaisly grab a widget of this page to put on your own websites and blogs. The WashingtonPost and The Guardian are just two of the first websites that have signed up to use this widget. The widget will highlight user submitted news and reports --> so this is a great way to get your election day coverage on these and other leading sites.

Gasta News: Brand turf war

Paid Search:Low intensity warfare on Google plains

Agencies aren't practicing what they preach when it comes to using paid search to market their brands, according to Adweek, and while these agencies are sleeping, some of their smaller competitors are using paid search to their advantage.

Buying your brand name would seem logical, but of the 56 agencies assessed by Adweek, only five had sponsored links tied to their names on Google. The others did not have paid search links, but their web pages generally appeared near the top of the search results.

"It's very difficult to recommend certain things to your clients if you're not in the game yourself," said Craig Conrad or Interpublic Group's Campbell-Ewald. "So often we're focused on our client business [that] sometimes it's easy to forget about our own brand."

While brand advertisers are up in arms over Google's lack of enforcement when it comes to piggybacking, it seems that some smaller agencies are actually using the practice themselves. A search for OgilvyInteractive yields a sponsored link for Stein Rogan + Partners, a small New York agency.

"Why not put ourselves out there as a viable alternative?" said Tom Stein, Stein Rogan's CEO. "It's a little bit of counter-marketing."

Gasta News:Internet feels the bite of Crunch!

Mixed News as internet feels the bite of Crunch!

A straw poll of media agencies from the NMA Top 100 Interactive Agencies 2007 guide found budgets are under pressure as marketers alter their media plans ahead of the potential economic downturn. The findings are in conflict with market predictions. A report by analyst firm Enders Analysis this week said UK online ad spends was set to grow...
Meanwhile automotive brands plan to stop using dedicated campaign sites as budgets tighten and consumer’s tire of fragmented content. Car brands including Mercedes and Land Rover plan to pull back from campaign sites for car launches, switching to a central online hub. Mercedes has launched a global online hub, built by Digital Annexe that will house all its brand activity. It has been built to incorporate video streaming, an easily updateable back-end system and increased promotional space....


Online Video's Short Shelf Life

On average, video viewer ship peaks early in a video's life-cycle.
Thursday 19th of June 2008 12:00:00 AM
We set out with a simple question: throughout the life of a video, do most views occur in the first few days and weeks or are they distributed randomly over time? Since Tube Mogul tracks millions of videos, we turned to the data and were surprised to find such a robust trend: viewer ship peaks early.
Methodology
Our sample includes data for views by day for 10,916 videos over a 90 day time period. In order to exclude casual creators of online video (i.e. "Mickey’s Birthday"), each video in the sample achieved a minimum of 1,000 cumulative views over the 90 day time period.
On average, videos are time-sensitive. Trends pointed out elsewhere, such as "evergreen" (non-time sensitive) content always fetching views or videos randomly "going viral," seem more of a rarity than an underlying trend in the data.

Gasta News:Search engines warned over data

Search engines should delete personal data held about their users within six months, a European Commission advisory body on data protection has said.

The recommendation is likely to be accepted by the European Commission and could lead to a clash with search giants like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Google and MSN anonymise user data after 18 months, while Yahoo does the same after 13 months.

The body said search companies were not clear enough on data protection.

Google said its privacy policy "strikes the right balance" between privacy, security and innovation.

Peter Fleischer, Google's global privacy counsel, said in a statement: "Google takes privacy incredibly seriously; protecting our users' privacy is at the heart of all our products.

"It is the reason we were the first company to commit to anonymising our search logs, and also why we dramatically shortened our preference cookie lifetime."

In a statement Yahoo said it was reviewing the details of the body's recommendations.

"We remain committed to striking the right balance between protecting user privacy, providing the most compelling online experience, meeting our legal obligations and preventing fraud," the firm said.

Many search engines currently collect and store information from each search query, holding information about the search query itself, the unique PC address (known as an IP number), and details about how a user makes their searches, such as the web browser that is being used.

Users who create an account with a search engine hand over more data to the firms, including search history. Some search engines also enrich personal data held on their users with information from third parties.

The report from the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party said search engine providers had "insufficiently explained" why they were storing and processing personal data to their users.

It said "search engine providers must delete or irreversibly anonymise personal data once they no longer serve the specified and legitimate purpose they were collected for".

The report said the personal data of users should not be stored or processed "beyond providing search results" if the user had not created an account or registered with the search engine.

The advisory body also said it preferred search engines did not collect and use personal data to serve personalised adverts unless the user had consented and signed up to the service.

The body was set up to provide expert opinion to the European Commission and to make recommendations in the areas of personal data and privacy. The Commission usually adopts the recommendations the body makes.

The report also said search engines did not need to gather additional personal data, beyond the IP address of a machine being used, in order to deliver basic search results and advertisements.

It added: "Because many search engine providers mention many different purposes for the processing, it is not clear to what extent data are reprocessed for another purpose that is incompatible with the purpose for which they were originally collected."

It said search engines should not use personally identifiable data to improve their services or for accountancy purposes.

Personal data stored for security purposes should not also be used to improve services, the body recommended.

The report issued a set of obligations to search engines firms, including:

• Search engines should get informed consent from users if they correlate personal data across different services, such as desktop search
• Search engine providers must delete or anonymise (in an irreversible and efficient way) personal data once they are no longer necessary for the purpose for which they were collected
• Personal data should not be held by search engines for longer than six months
• In case search engine providers retain personal data longer than six months, they must demonstrate comprehensively that it is strictly necessary for the service
• It is not necessary to collect additional personal data from individual users in order to be able to perform the service of delivering search results and advertisements
• If search engine providers use cookies, their lifetime should be no longer than demonstrably necessary
• Search engine providers must give users clear and intelligible information about their identity and location and about the data they intend to collect store or transmit, as well as the purpose for which they are collected

The report also warned that if search engines enriched personal data about users from third parties they could be breaking the law unless customers had given explicit consent.

It said users had the right to access, inspect and correct all the personal data about themselves held by search engines, including their profiles and search history.

By Darren Waters
Technology editor, BBC News website

Gasta SearchMatch offers real value for money.

GASTA News: Web advertising outstrips TV

Here is a fascinating article from Rich Ord the CEO of iEntry, Inc.

Despite the fact that social media advertising has yet to hit its stride and is taking some lumps for low click rates when compared to high page views, it will succeed. Social media is a different type of advertising platform from information-oriented websites and the two should not be compared.

The reality is that social media delivers the holy grail for advertisers on the Internet: a mass-concentrated U.S. audience reach similar to television.
The top 25 social media networks delivered over 155 million unique visitors in Feb. 2008 with 70 percent coming from MySpace, Facebook and Classmates.com. Add in Youtube and Flickr and you get another 60 million totalling an estimated 215 million humans viewing social media monthly.

Compare that to television where an average 24-hour period delivers around 50 million unique viewers. The highest viewer ship day of the year, Super Bowl Sunday, has an estimated 110 million unique U.S. residents viewing television. Even over an entire month there is arguably less than 200 million total unique television viewers.

The Internet has become a powerful platform for advertisers to reach mass audiences via user generated video too. According to comScore Video Metrix, U.S. Internet users viewed over 10 billion videos online in the month of December alone. Imagine a 15 to 30 second commercial with each video view and the Internet seems ready today to compete with broadcast TV in delivering commercial views.

Advertising on social media is not about clicks or click rate any more than TV commercials are; it's about quickly reaching a huge U.S audience. Sooner rather than later, advertisers will see social media as a great way to reach mass audiences. After all, in terms of audience size there are several Super Bowls every day on Facebook, MySpace and Youtube!

It simply doesn't matter what the click rate is for Facebook, MySpace and Youtube because they reach huge audiences that major advertisers like Ford, Pepsi and McDonald's can't help but see the value in. Predictably, Adwords buyers will see the value too.

Click rates are a reflection of page views and social media sites similar to TV have a large overlapping audience that hang around them all day, every day. Television would have a low click rate too if an ad campaign were measured over the course of a months worth of programs on the same network, assuming you could click the screen.

People also tune in and out of TV just like they do with social media. According to Compete's figures for every unique visitor to Youtube there are 54 page views. With Facebook, a unique visitor creates an amazing 564 page views in a month and on MySpace each person generates a staggering 1,110 page views.

The social media audience is loyal, large and habit-oriented just like broadcast TV. They also hit the prime youth-tilting demographic who are big spenders online and are considered a high value audience by ad agencies and advertisers. Ultimately, what advertiser’s value is the audience, not just the clicks?

http://archive.webpronews.com/2008a/0318.html

Gasta News, Adconion Media group receives investment of $80m

Gasta News Venture Capital: Good News for European Online Ad advertsiser Adconion

Adconion obtains record venture round in Europe

26 February 2008: Adconion Media Group, Munich, one of the world’sgrowing online advertising networks, has announced a £40.9 million (US$80 million) Series C round of venture funding. The financing is the largest online media venture investment in European history.

The investment was led by Index Ventures, who were joined by existing investor Wellington Partners, and represents the first investment made from Index’s recently announced growth fund. The capital will be used to continue expansion into Europe, US and Asia, strengthening the company’s position as an independent player. In addition, capital will be invested in Adconion’s behavioral targeting technology and also to fund selected acquisitions. Index partners’ Dominique Vidal, former CEO of Yahoo! Europe, and Giuseppe Zocco, the firm’s co-founder, will join Adconion’s board of directors.

“Adconion has the relationships, the expertise and the best in class technology becoming of a future market-leader in technology’s hottest growth sector,” says Dom Vidal of Index Ventures. “Our experience as investors in the advertising space enables us to support Adconion in continuing its rapid expansion throughout Europe and North America and to further build its global presence. As online media becomes more fragmented and as agencies look for more independent partners for solutions, we believe ad networks like Adconion are perfectly positioned to capture more advertising spend.”

“At the risk of sounding clichéd, the modern business landscape is irrefutably global in scale and that is due primarily to the opportunities created by the Internet,” says Adconion founder and CEO Tyler Moebius. “Agencies choose to partner with Adconion because their clients are likely in a position where doing business internationally is either ‘business as usual’ or a strategic opportunity for growth. This substantial investment from Index and Wellington will position Adconion alongside the portals on marketer’s short-lists for global distribution partners.”

“Tyler and his team have done an outstanding job building a truly global online advertising network,” says Frank Boehnke of Wellington Partners. 'We are very excited to continue to work with Tyler and Adconion on one of the most exciting growth stories in the global marketplace.”