Insights and etiquette: making money from social media

Two incontrovertible facts in social media. Firstly there are enough eyeballs spending enough time on it that any other media owner would have monetized them. And secondly (as Facebook share price indicates) to date they haven’t been. To our minds it’s a matter of etiquette. Something, that really hasn’t been formalized as yet online, but is beginning to emerge. We think of Facebook as being your friendly local pub. You hang out with your mates and chat. And just as one wouldn’t want advertising over a pint with mates, one doesn’t want it in one’s virtual pub. But this being the data rich online world in which we live, we can take and use the insights that chat creates. We can take the subjects being chatted about, and the network of individuals chatting, and use that data to target them outside of the “pub”. Social media insights, applied to web wide display advertising. It’s a group you know are interested in your product or service, even if they haven’t been to your website yet. Proper behaviour from advertisers, but leveraging real consumer behaviour. And do we like the results! Mike Colling Managing Director