Social advertising
Over at ClikZ Sean Carton suggests that the fact that social networking services like Facebook generate billions of pageviews doesn’t necessarily mean they are all monetizable. Or that an advertiser should want to advertise on such properties in traditional (read: intrusive) ways using banners, overlays, etc. It’s something I’ll be working on a lot in my new job at Hyves, Holland’s largest social networking service. And although the solution direction is not that surprising, stay close to user behavior on such sites and add value to the experience, it’s not going to be easy to execute this well. So we should provide the instruments to at least make it easier… More on those later.
“What’s this got to do with social-networking advertising? Everything. Search marketing works because it understands search’s essential nature: people looking for stuff. Where social networking advertising (at least the passive model that uses banners or, in many cases, contextual advertising) falls down is it fails to recognize the essential nature of social networking. People come to hang out with other people. Anything that gets in the way ruins the experience and will be avoided.â€

