You’ve no doubt heard the complaints that advertising on the social networking websites doesn’t get the return expected by online marketers. High pageviews, low click-thru rates.

However, there’s another way of looking at this: social networking websites can deliver a demographically focused audience that is not widely available online. Even offline, only TV can deliver this type of audience.

In February, the 25 top social networking sites put 155 million unique visitors face-to-face with advertisers. MySpace, Facebook & Classmates.com delivered over 70% of that total. Tacking on YouTube and Flickr increases the total to 215 million unique viewers a month. Best estimate for TV is less than 200 million unique viewers per month.

There’s more. According to ComScore Video Metrix, US web users watched over 10 billion videos just in December, 2007. Many of those were soft-pedalling commercials … and many more are ripe to have a short commercial attached to the end.

But the most attractive social networking media feature is the younger demographic with high disposable income, much sought-after by ad agencies and advertisers. It’s too big and too focused an audience for that strong marketing connection to not be made eventually.

Social networking websites may currently be struggling for traditional advertisers, but the signs point to a happy, profitable future for them - together.

MySpace recently began offering members several hundred new applications, in test mode, with many more to come. Members can check out a wide variety of applications, and the developers get to see how their apps perform under the pressure.

MySpace is still the Big Dog of social networks, and they’d like to keep the title. The wide range of apps available in one place has the potential to help MySpace users become even more addicted.

Some samples of new MySpace apps:

• Photo Shout Out - Say it with photos! Add your own voice shout out to your pics, and send to friends.
• Graffiti - Draw graffiti for your friends.
• MindJolt Games - Over 250 games! Play any of the Arcade, Puzzle, Strategy and Sports games we offer for free.
• Flixster - Flixster Movies lets you see what your friends say about movies.
• Blingee Book - Add animated graphics, comments, and all sorts of goodies to your pictures for fun or glamour.
• Quizzes - Take quizzes, surveys, polls & personality tests. Make your own quizzes & share with friends.
• Twitter Sync - Sync your myspace mood status with twitter. Just click the sync button and you’re done!
• Yahoo! Music Videos - Simply the largest collection of music videos on MySpace. Dive in and let the good tunes roll!
• flauntR: Photo Editor and Styler - Style your photos with 1000’s of photo frames, stickers, magazine covers & slideshows.
• Fuser - Your Facebook on MySpace! Note: you must already have a Facebook account to use Fuser.
• Graphics Search Engine - With the all4myspace.com graphics search engine you can search for thousands of (glitter)graphics!
• Spin The Bottle - Join the world’s coolest Spin the Bottle game and pass virtual kisses to tons of hotties.
• 123Greetings Cards - Cards for over 3,000 occasions as well as the everyday thank you, birthday, love & friendship cards.
• Pickup Lines - See a different hilarious pickup line each time your page is displayed.
• Top Friends Cupid - Scientifically analyze 17 different parts of your profile to find out who you are compatible with.
• Jobs - Searching for a job? Let the jobs come to you! This handy widget will tell you who’s hiring!
• and many more

Facebook has almost a year headstart over MySpace in opening up to outside application developers. And where MySpace is starting with a few hundreds of these apps, Facebook now has over 14,000 … which many analysts credit for Facebook’s meteoric rise in popularity the last few months.

Here is a simple 7-step social marketing strategy to help you build a stronger prospect base:

1. If you haven’t done so already, specifically define your very tightly focused target niche market. Use your favorite keyword tool to find the most-searched keywords for your market. Use this list to help zero in on exactly what niche you want to appeal to.
2. Make sure your social networking site profiles are focused on this very specific target. The more focused you are, the more your visitors will see you as a specialist. And we all want to be mentored by the specialist, the expert. The more focused you are, the more appealing you will be to your target market.
3. Go to MySpace or FaceBook or whichever social networking sites you favor. Check the groups on those sites against your keywords. Find groups that are related to your very focused specialty.
4. Add members of those groups to your friends list.
5. Start your own group on MySpace and Facebook and other sites. Again, be very specific. This will stamp you as a leader and will help to raise your profile on that particular social networking website.
6. Invite your friends and those in other more widely-focused related groups to join your group. Keep an eye on these larger groups. Every time someone signs up, contact them to tell them about your group and invite them to join.
7. When you add to your networking website - or your personal web page - send a short, descriptive comment to each member of your group to let them know, and invite them to read the full article. This is especially effective when a comment shows up on a member profile page, so it can be viewed by the public.

What you want is to create a core following of raving fans. This social networking strategy isn’t going to get you huge traffic, but if you give really useful information in a focused niche, you can definitely build a strong fan base that may be very lucrative to you over time

The recruitment website Milkround.com recently surveyed 500 students and graduates about their use of the social networking websites MySpace, Facebook, and Bebo. Results:

• Facebook: 97% of the 500 respondents use it; 93% of respondents favor it
• MySpace: 44% use it
• Bebo: 23% use it

Grads and students were asked to rate the 3 social networking websites on a 1 to 5 scale for

• Contact with friends
• Photo & video sharing
• New relationships
• Social planning
• Networking for jobs
• Overall entertainment

Overall Ratings:

• Facebook: 3.5
• MySpace: 2.3
• Bebo: 1.7

Interesting Results:

1. Only 6% of the students & grads have used their Facebook, MySpace, or Bebo profile in a job search. Overwhelmingly, these sites are used strictly for social networking.
2. 82% of respondents use privacy settings, restricting who can view their profile. Half of these use the most restrictive privacy setting.

MOST Interesting Result:

Results of this survey indicate how difficult it would be for another social networking utility to take market share from Facebook, MySpace, & Bebo. Only 19% said they might switch to a new site with a bunch of whizz-bang gizmos. These students and grads made their original choice of favorite site because that’s where their friends are. A majority would ONLY change if their friends did, and most of these prefer not to change at all, having already invested time & emotion in building their profile.

“Despite suffering its first drop in traffic following 17 months of successive increases since July 2006 in January, Facebook is still immensely popular among students and graduates. It’s clearly ahead of its competitors in terms of staying in contact with friends and sharing files online, Bebo and MySpace will need to improve their usability to come close to toppling the Facebook dominance. However, all of the major three sites would benefit if they could encourage users to meet new people or even think of ways to help users find a job.” - Milkround.com spokesman Mike Barnard

“Googling” is everywhere. We’ve all heard of employees getting fired - or applicants not hired - because of their Facebook or MySpace profile. And when you search for a potential employer, you might find a list of lawsuits, complaints and “IHateAcme.com” websites. Or you might find a list of company press releases. Either way, there’s a good chance what you find will influence your impression.

To monitor that “you” brand:

1. Set up Google Alerts for your name
2. Check Technorati regularly for your name in blogs
3. Check Google Video for your name in videos

How can you help make sure that your “YOU” brand shows up positively & accurately?

Don’t reveal everything to the world in your social networking profiles or on your blogs. Think what you would want to find in the social media if you were hiring “you”. Then create a professional profile to match for Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.

Register “yourname.com”, if it’s available. If not, get the .net domain or .org or one of the others. Set up a blog, if you don’t have one, with this domain name. Anyone who links will probably use your name for anchor text. Your blog can link to your Facebook profile, or YouTube video, or Flickr photos, etc. You can write up a bio for your “About me” page & link to a resume.

Link from your blog to your articles posted online, and to the positive pages created about you. Be sure to go to Digg & StumbleUpon and other social bookmarking sites to bookmark these pages.

Whenever you put something online, remind yourself: “This is eternal.” Because it pretty much is.

You don’t need to do all this reputation management today. But long-range, this plan will strengthen that brand of “YOU.”

Recent changes have opened Facebook up to everyone. Whoever you are, you can now use Facebook to your best advantage, to expand your reach, to promote you, to solidly brand you.

Facebook is not just about old friends from school anymore. Plan: what connections would benefit you most in the future? What really fascinates you? If you could do anything, what would it be? What industry would you work in? What specific people, or what categories of people would be your closest friends & confidantes?

For effective Facebook branding, find groups that fall in your category and join them. Make friends amongst the group members. Go back and read over your personal profile. If you were one of these people YOU want to connect with, what would be your impression of you? Is that a profile of someone YOU would like and trust?

Fill out every box in your profile. The purpose of social marketing is to connect with the right people. Who knows exactly what they will see that will make the connection happen? So jam every G-rated bit of yourself that you can into that profile. You never know who will connect with you because your favorite movie is “The Maltese Falcon.” Give them plenty of intersection points.

As visitors write on your Facebook wall, compare what they say to your brand. You must know what your brand is, have it sharply defined, then eliminate what shouldn’t be there. Get rid of anything that doesn’t contribute to your brand.

To strongly connect with the right people, put out there who you really are. Write on other walls. Put up a comment about their pictures. Ask questions. The more you are part of their Facebook life, the more chance your brand will make an impression. Plus, they see you as being serious about the medium.

Don’t make your profile too busy. If you include a bunch of apps, it will obscure the real you. Keep it simple, so it’s easy to see your Facebook brand.

If you can do video, add a YouTube application to your Facebook profile. And if you can’t do video, learn to. Visitors can really bond with you when they watch your well-planned 2-minute video. Optimum, of course, is an on-brand video that enhances who you are.

Promote your profile. Just doing a profile isn’t enough. It will sit there forever, adding no value to your life or anyone else’s. Strategy #1 is to join those targeted groups and interact with the other group members. And once you have a bit of experience with that … define exactly what would be the ideal group you’d like to join. Then create it yourself. What better way to find the specific people you want to connect with?

Evaluate your Facebook brand at least weekly. Update something. Social marketing is not a sport for hermits. You need to demonstrate that you are serious, and serious visitors will notice. You will get to meet those targeted people that otherwise would never have found you.

Advertising may not be the best way to get new business from social media sites like Facebook and MySpace. The reality is those sites were not designed to be advertising sites. They were designed to be networking sites.

Imagine this: You are invited to a attend a free trade show in your industry. You decide to go, thinking it could be a good way to meet new people, potential business partners, and customers. When you get to the trade show, before you can walk in the door, you are bombarded with purchasing offers and come ons for products totally unrelated to your industry. The people trying to sell you their products don’t know you, they’ve never met you, they haven’t even asked you if you’re interested in the type of product they’re offering. Yet they feel the need to interrupt your focus and try to sell you something you have no need for and have no interest in.

Finally, you make your way inside the meetin. Now you can be at peace. But not so fast. You approach a table to see who is there and find out that it is run by people who are not related to your business or even have a presence in your industry. They are trying to sell you a product. You move on to the next table. It’s a booth and you make some new friends. These people are in your industry and are there for the same reasons you are. You decide to kill some time and hang out. But the moment you walk away from the table you are bombarded with offers from people in unrelated industries for products you have no desire for. Would you go back to that trade show next year?

Social networking sites are for networking. Don’t be fooled into thinking it’s a great place to advertise. Your best bet for getting new business at Facebook and MySpace is to set up a profile page and become a networker.   This is best for social marketing. With any luck, you’ll be able to ignore the ads.

(Source) Imagine if all the conversations on Facebook were fed through natural language interpreters in order to understand users’ likes and dislikes. Take this a step further and imagine if all of the users photos were fed through image interpreters to find commercial products. In theory, a system could be created sophisticated enough to identify the clothing brand of a person featured in an image, determine who is influenced by this person and use this information to market to specific targets. Think about the impact on a high-schooler who sees an ad delivered on Facebook featuring the beautiful cheerleader at his school with a Pepsi can in the background. This system could work equally well for co-workers, family members and significant others. The possibilities for ‘relationship driven advertising’ are practically endless.

This kind of system would enable companies to stop spending millions for a celebrity endorsement and start buying a guaranteed recommendation from an influencer of a potential buyer for a fraction of the cost.

Is this what Facebook is coming to? If so then you’ll have to forget everything you know about social marketing.

Yesterday, Search Engine Optimization Journal wrote a post predicting that search engines and social networking sites would integrate to revolutionize both search and social marketing. If SEOmoz is correct, we may be closer to that that we can imagine.

Of course, it won’t happen tomorrow. But Microsoft could be poised to take top traffic and marketshare from Google within five years. Unless Google develops its plan first. With Google partnering with MySpace, which is working hard to play catch up to Facebook, and Microsoft partnering with Facebook while working to play catch up to Google in the search arena, this fight could get really interesting.

There is a major shuffle going on right now in the search and the social marketing industries. Google is losing employees - key employees - fast. Facebook is acquiring them. Yahoo! is losing them. MySpace is tinkering in the background. Ask, of course, is just doing its own thing, and doing it fairly well. But unless Ask develops real social applications that appeal to the masses with the cashes, it won’t be a major player. It’s quite possible that within five years the search/social marketing industry will be dominated to two giants: GoogleSpace and MSNbook. That will be interesting to see.

I agree with Sean at Mashable on this one.

Recessions are difficult to predict and harder to explain. They rely on fundamental aspects of economics that much of the Internet does have to abide by. Simply put, taxes are an issue off line, but online they are not so much so. If the price of paper rises or falls, people online aren’t bothered by it. On the other hand, if ISP prices move up or down then people online are much more concerned whereas people off line hardly notice, unless they’re an ISP customer (even then, you won’t see much of an economic ripple).

Off line advertising might slow down. It already has, in fact, been in decline for the past 3-5 years. I guess you could call that an advertising recession. Or could you? Probably not since online advertising has increased during the same time. Which is Sean’s point (the broader point at least).

Fuel prices, a new president, economic slow down in certain sectors, decline in value of the dollar, all of these could contribute to businesses cutting their advertising budgets. But would they stop advertising altogether or simply transfer their budget to online advertising instead? There is no historical information to give us a clue. As Sean so eloquently pointed out, any allusion to past data regarding this matter online is outdated and won’t shed any new light on the topic. There simply is no data to tell us how today’s online consumers and advertisers will respond to an off line economic downturn.

One thing I will take issue with Sean Aune on is that consumers will automatically embrace online commerce. His own words:

1) Consumers will be turning more to the Internet for all of their shopping needs. Where it has previously been a convenient part of Christmas shopping, they are becoming more comfortable with it, and the lure of no sales tax, the occasional offers of free shipping, and not having to gas up the car to drive somewhere, will send more of them to do their everyday buying online.

Consumers have already turned to the Internet for many of their shopping needs. They are more likely to search for real estate online and more likely to research their next purchase in clothing, computers, automobiles, and a huge bevy of other product lines on the Internet before actually making a purchase. However, they are still more likely to drive to a local merchant to make the purchase. That’s today. Could that change?

It could, but there would have to be a drastic event, I think, to make it change drastically. An off line downturn in the economy might be the drastic event. If gas prices go up and people prefer to do less driving, that could happen. People are becoming more at ease with doing business online, but will that translate into increased purchases online during a recession? That remains to be seen.

If consumers do end up spending more online then advertisers will definitely spend more money on advertising, regardless of what is happening off line. If consumers slow down purchasing altogether - online and off line - then advertisers will spend less. The undeclared and unknown variable is how consumers will act. Therein lies the mystery.

I will see this as a final caveat, if consumers spend more and advertisers spend more in response, Google will likely end up making more money and you could see their stock rise again. You’ll see more content network advertising and possibly places like Facebook and other social networking sites will increases in their stock values as well.

Lemonade Stand is an application you can set up and sell products through on commission. You currently can’t sell your own products through Lemonade Stand, but the developers “hope to add this functionality in the near future.” But you do earn 80% of the commission payout from anything you do sell through the application; the other 20% goes to the application developers. That’s fair.

Currently, you are limited to the products of the affiliates Lemonade Stand has in its system. They are adding new companies all the time and boast that they have 1.5 million products.

I recommend Lemonade Stand if you have a well-trafficked profile page on Facebook and have a lot of friends. I wouldn’t install it if you just have a handful of friends and don’t update your profile on a regular basis. You likely won’t get a lot of people to buy from you unless they trust you so if you plan to use Facebook as a business model then you should put some time into trust building activities like blogging, newsletter publishing, and article writing. But it does look like it has some potential for ancillary income.

(Source) Social media marketing is more about conversations and influence than it is about offers and conversions. Create accounts, make friends, comment and vote on content.

These two sentences represent the biggest misconception about social media.

Last year I tried to do some marketing through MySpace. I found out that there were so many people going online and setting up a profile then sending out messages to all their friends, like, five times a day. Most of them were just “come on” offers. Not very effective.

Even the blogs were spam oriented. MySpace bloggers would write up a four paragraph article about how great they were at X. There was no relationship building. Just self-congratulatory praises that seemed empty and hollow. I was supposed to just take these anonymous strangers at face value and believe they had the answer to all my dreams only because they said so.

If this is the way you are approaching social media marketing, it’s no wonder you’re not being effective. Whether you use MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, or another medium, the principle is the same. You are there to build relationships. Start a conversation. Or join one. Treat people the same way you’d treat them at a social gathering in your neighborhood. Would you walk up to the punch bowl and just start talking about how wonderful you are without first introducing yourself or trying to get to know the people in the room? If so, you probably have a lot of people who shun you at parties.

It’s time for social marketers to put the social back in marketing - and that means being sociable. Just because you can’t see the person face to face doesn’t mean you should treat them like a piece of meat. They are human. Talk to them like you’d want them to talk to you, and refrain from “pushing.” Just have fun and make contacts. That’s the way to do social media marketing.

Social networking sites like Facebook and Bebo can be good in a lot of ways. There is no lack of information regarding the benefits of social networking for busy professionals and college co-eds. If you’re in business where image matters, LinkedIn might be more to your liking. Social networking of any kind can be a huge benefit. In an artsy profession like music or interior design? There are social networking sites where you’d fit in and you are encouraged to participate.

But there have been negatives to follow from social networking as well. People have lost their jobs due to what was placed in profiles. People have not been hired for certain jobs because a potential employer conducted a background check and discovered something they felt was incompatible with employment by the firm. Now, college students are starting to feel the fall out as well.

Social networking is about relationships. Building for now, and building for the future. But when you are involved with an organization that has its own reputation to consider and you want to maintain your relationship with that organization, it might be to your own benefit to consider their concerns. Otherwise, you may find yourself without a job or college education.

The first Open Web Awards hosted by Mashable was a success. The awards night was a bit late since the winners were already announced last December 21, 2007. But still, it was a success and I’m hoping this won’t just be a first.

The conference was held yesterday January 10 at sunny San Francisco, California at the Palace Hotel. The whole Social Media and Web 2.0 community has finally got to recognizing the best of the best. A total of 250,000 votes were cast. Next year, I am certain it’ll be bigger— more nominations, more finalists, and hopefully more sponsors so the prizes will be bigger.

Here are the winners of Mashable’s first ever Open Web Awards.

1. PEOPLE’S CHOICE
Mainstream and Large Social Networks
Netlog

Applications and Widgets
WidgetBucks

Social News and Social Bookmarking
digg

Social Search
facebook

Sports and Fitness
SPORTME

Photo Sharing
VOIS

Video Sharing
Kaltura

Start Pages
iGoogle

Places and Events
myspace.com

Music
PANDORA

Social Shopping
ZliO

Mobile
Google Mobile

Niche and Miscellaneous Social Networks
cafemom

3. JUDGE’S CHOICE
Mainstream and Large Social Networks
facebook

Applications and Widgets
Flock

Social News and Social Bookmarking
digg

Social Search
Mahalo

Sports and Fitness
ESPN

Photo Sharing
flickr

Video Sharing
YouTube

Start Pages
netvibe

Places and Events
Meetup

Music
last.fm

Social Shopping
woot!

Mobile
twitter

Niche and Miscellaneous Social Networks
FilmCrave

Websites like facebook and digg are lucky to have been awarded twice. I agree more with the Judge’s Choice than with the People’s Choice though.

Congratulations to the winners! Here’s to a more successful and social Web 2.0 and Social Media in 2008!

Google and Facebook, together with Plaxo recently announced that they will be joining the DataPortability Workgroup. The announcement was a sigh of relief for those people upset with the recent Facebook brouhaha.

You see, Facebook currently is making a lot of application programmers crazy by not allowing them to import their own data. While I think this can be good for the part of Facebook, it’s doomsday for the programmers. It’s like there’s really no going out.

Facebook has become so popular last year and now it’s turning to a prima donna. But good thing the announcement will somehow bring an end to the controversy. Atleast, excitement is building up.

However, it was a mere announcement. It’s not as if Facebook users and application developers can all out access the data they need right away. Let’s just wait and see.

So we’re done with the predictions. Looks like social marketing is here to stay. Better yet, is here to lead the way of Internet marketing. The YouTube boom and the sudden popularity of Facebook are just perhaps two of the most memorable successes in 2007. From Web 2.0, we are slowly moving to Web 3.0 and now there are talks about Web 4.0. It can be quite confusing to differentiate, but only one thing is clear : Internet marketing, whether SEO, e-mail marketing, and video marketing, will still be the fastest and most phenomenal means of marketing.

Traditional marketing will still be effective but more people will turn to their Macs and PCs instead of their newspapers and TVs. I agree with Blue Magnet that “social and search marketing is clearly leading the way together with e-mail and mobile marketing.” And I so agree with their Top 10 Internet Marketing Tips :

1. Optimise your website’s content. SEO is still important. If you still haven’t gotten to optimizing your site’s content, start now. Love your audience. Love Google.
2. Create a content development strategy for your website. Nothing’s better than having a good plan. Check if it’s time for you to change niche or directions.
3. Invest in a paid search (pay-per-click) campaign. AdWords or Overture. Choose just one expect more search traffic.
4. Publicize your website through article marketing. Doing PR work is not just for traditional media. Article directories and submissions will be good for your linkbuilding efforts.
5. Develop a social media marketing strategy. Into Facebook? MySpace? There are hundreds of social networks and bookmarks that allow you to share whatever you have.
6. Create a Company Blog. Enough said. Blog will be bigger this year so take time to develop a readable and interesting blog.
7. Experiment with video marketing. You’ll be surprised how videos can help. Why do you think Google bought YouTube in the first place?
8. Engage your audiences with web widget marketing. Widgets are everywhere. Why not join in the bandwagon?
9. Discover the benefits of mobile marketing. Your mobile phone will only get thinner and smarter but it will be one powerful marketing tool. Companies should learn how to do more effective mobile marketing.
10. Create an effective email marketing strategy. E-mails will still be effective this year. Make sure though that you think of different ways on how to catch the attention of your audience. Don’t make them look like they are ready to be sent to the Spam folder.