engagement

More social, please: Facebook nixes banner ads

Microsoft and Facebook announced earlier on Friday a big change in their search and advertising relationship: that Facebook will handle all of its own graphical ads, ending a 2007 advertising agreement with Microsoft that accompanied Redmond's $240 million investment in the social network. At the same time, a more enhanced version of Microsoft's Bing search engine will be available through Facebook.

But Facebook, as it turns out, is getting rid of traditional banner ads altogether.

"We recently stopped displaying Microsoft's banner ads in some international markets. After additional talks with Microsoft, we have agreed to stop … Read more

Citizen complaint app finally fires up TechCrunch50

SAN FRANCISCO--It's about time people got excited over here.

It's not that the smattering of fresh new companies presenting at the annual TechCrunch50 start-up launch conference was boring, per se. Most of them, in fact, had an extremely practical slant to them, like the array of job- and car-hunting sites that take something Craigslist does and make it way less sketchy. And therein lies the problem: Sometimes, those sorts of productivity and next-gen enterprise start-ups simply aren't that cool and shiny when you stick them into a PowerPoint demo.

But it was on the morning of the … Read more

Study: The biggest brands on the Web

Can social media really help grow your business? A new study aims to find out by ranking the top brands on the Web.

Starbucks came in first place among the most branded or engaged names on the Web, according to the study released Monday by analyst Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group and Wetpaint.

The study, available at the Engagementdb Web site, scored how engaged the top 100 global brands are at using social-media channels, including blogs, Facebook, Twitter, wikis, and discussion forums.

Each brand was scored based on whether or not it uses all the different social media channels … Read more

Is advertising dead? The third way of building brand equity

There seem to be three (non-mutually exclusive) models for marketers tasked with building brand equity: marketing scarcity, marketing artificial scarcity, or marketing relevance.

Scarcity seems to be at the core of all marketing: an exclusive, unique value that can be reproduced; an original idea replicated for many. That's how markets work, how marketing works. Branding is effective when it keeps the aura of an original idea intact despite its mechanical reproduction. Apple's original idea, for instance, could be described as "technology must be fun and human," and it has not lost an inch of its integrity. … Read more

Downstream solutions. Upstream problems.

By Nick de la Mare

I saw an interesting article in the New York Times this weekend titled "Put Ad on Web. Count Clicks. Revise." The premise of the article goes something like this: because the web provides functionality to test every variation of a banner ad for effectiveness, the next big thing is tailoring advertising in the moment, and leveraging findings from click-thru rates to construct more relevant offerings for consumers. If I had to construct a tag-line for the so-called "data practice" services cited in this article it would be "downstream solutions to … Read more

Facebook's ad pitch: Meet the 'active network'

NEW YORK--"We're here today to talk about how many friends you can have," Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said in her keynote address at the AdAge Digital conference on Wednesday, the same day that Facebook announced that it had reached the milestone of 200 million active users around the world. "This is certainly something I thought about a bit before I joined Facebook, but in the last year, this has been a major question in my life."

But the major question she was addressing in her talk was a different one: namely, can … Read more

LotusLive Engage: IBM's cloud gets social

In the 1990s, Lotus Notes gained notoriety, in part, for the nifty collaboration features it brought to corporate e-mail. IBM's CEO at the time, Lou Gerstner, was so impressed that he paid a premium to consummate what began as a hostile tender to buy Lotus in 1995.

Notes went on to become an unqualified commercial success with some 145 million users around the world who use the product. Still, Lotus hasn't quite secured for itself the reputation of offering the must-have enterprise collaboration technology in the age of the Internet.

What with the proliferation of competing Web-based technologies … Read more

Facebook to woo marketers with revamped 'fan pages'

Facebook's all set to make a product development announcement of sorts on Wednesday in the form of what it calls an "Open Door" event featuring CEO Mark Zuckerberg and several other executives. The most notable portion of it--according to an e-mail from the company's press corps--is that it'll unveil "the next evolution of Facebook Pages."

Facebook Pages, as you may recall, are the free profiles that brands can set up to establish a presence on the social network, which now has over 175 million members worldwide. Members can sign onto the pages as &… Read more

Facebook's face time at Davos

Story updated with Facebook response--see below.

Facebook seems to have turned some heads at the high-profile World Economic Forum with its real-time feedback and polling set-ups.

CNN reported from the Davos, Switzerland, gathering of government and business leaders that Facebook, along with YouTube and MySpace, brought social networking to new prominence in such elite company, from which it can often seem a generation gap away.

Facebook's Randi Zuckerberg was especially enthusiastic about the response, according to CNN.

"When you look at the audience you can really see this eureka moment in their eyes when they see 2,500 … Read more