Brands who want to get the attention of social network site users need to think beyond the usual banner ads and widgets.

While those types of ads can work if they are creative and carefully targeted, in general we’re finding that interruptive advertising on social sites just isn’t as effective as marketing messages delivered in a format that dovetails with the things that people are doing on social sites — interacting with their friends and colleges.

One of the most interesting and measurably successful new ways for brands to connect with social network users is virtual goods, also known as e-gifts. It’s a business model that’s just starting to hit its stride in the US and Europe and is already a key business model in Asia. According to a recent article in BusinessWeek “Two-thirds of the $523 million in sales by China’s Tencent social sites comes from virtual goods such as pets; only 13% is from advertising.”

The BusinessWeek article Lucrative Alternatives to Online Advertising went on to note that “Virtual goods (also known as ‘e-gifts’) are a better fit than traditional advertising on socially oriented sites… That’s because ads are more distracting than alluring on sites where people are there to interact with one another rather than surf for information or products. By contrast, virtual goods are essentially social artifacts that people use to gain status among online peers.” …Read More…

The annual Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA) Summit has established a blog carnival, and one of the subjects they are asking people to react to is “Where Does Content Start Or Marketing Begin…And Vice Versa?”

At CreativeFeed we believe that successful digital marketing — like all marketing — must focus on connecting with consumers. It’s easy to create a buzz by just making a lot of noise with some oddball content, but buzz always dies down fast. Creating an ongoing, mutually beneficial conversation between consumers and a brand is more of a challenge but infinitely more valuable.

Effective marketing today is all about conversation, and listening to this conversation is where marketing efforts/content creation should start. Companies should obviously pay attention to the blogs belonging to well-known influencers and the consumer review forums that pertain to the particular brand’s industry,plus check the chatter on Twitter and Technorati and subscribe to feeds from the meme aggregators like Reddit and Mixx as well as blog aggregator feeds focused on the brand’s target consumer groups. Listening to this conversation results in the kind of market knowledge that big firms pay dearly to obtain — a constantly evolving and highly accurate insight into why and how people are responding to the brand and its services.

…Read More…

In a recent article Ogilvy’s China digital guru Kaiser Kuo said that said Beijing 2008 is the world’s first web 2.0 Olympics. And he went on to write:

There’s ample irony, and for some perhaps a certain poetic justice, in this — that the capital city of a country so infamous for censoring the Internet should be the first to host the Games in the age of Internet video sharing, citizen journalism, social networking, of microblogging, and the myriad online services and tools that have empowered ordinary people. Significantly, Beijing 2008 will also be the first Olympics in which a sizeable percentage, if not an absolute majority, of those in the audience will have in their pockets or purses a device capable of sending text, pictures, and often even video around the world almost instantaneously.

Another irony is that all of those devices in peoples’ pockets are provoking huge headaches for mainstream media here in the US. …Read More…

Jeremiah Owyang, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, is putting together a list of Social Computing Strategists and Community Managers at large enterprises.

In his post asking people to submit their names to the list Jeremiah says; “I’m often asked which companies have one of the two emerging roles, (companies love to benchmark against their peers) so I’ve decided to start a list, not only to back my research, but also for those wanting to show to their companies ‘hey this is starting to happen for real’.”

Jeremiah defines a Social Media Strategist as someone whose job is “to lead the internal charge, develops the program, gains resources, convinces management, and measures success”

The Community Manager’s “job is to primarily be a community advocate is a social media user, and is externally focused, they are primarily the face to the online community. As companies scale, I expect to see these types or roles appear often for each product group at larger companies, they often report directly to the strategist or at least have a dotted line.”

There’s another list for those of us, like CreativeFeed, specialize in managing the conversation for our clients.

- Arthur

I use the New York Times Technology news stories to gauge what services and tech have gone mainstream. The Times doesn’t do a great job of breaking tech news, but they do a wonderful job of telling me what’s become accepted, useful, essential.

Today, David Carr has an interesting piece on Facebook’s value as a work/network tool. There’s nothing new here — even the bit about a senior executive’s assistant managing his/her Facebook profile — but Carr does raise some interesting points about a maturing Facebook and digital networking.

Snipped from the article:

I think of Facebook as a middle ground between business and pleasure, sort of MySpace for post-adolescents or LinkedIn for professional late adopters like me….

As we speak, my Facebook page, a couple of months old, is crawling past 200 friends. There are people on there whom I have known since they wore skinny ties and distressed sport coats, and there are others whom I would not know if they walked up with name tags on the size of sandwich boards. But we have friends in common, and in the parlance of social media, we are connected.

As we speak, my Facebook page, a couple of months old, is crawling past 200 friends. There are people on there whom I have known since they wore skinny ties and distressed sport coats, and there are others whom I would not know if they walked up with name tags on the size of sandwich boards. But we have friends in common, and in the parlance of social media, we are connected.

Although he used to be a reporter, we are not what I would call peers. He wrote one of the greatest sports books ever, and oh, one of the best books about city government ever. “Friday Night Lights” became a movie and then a television series and apart from me being a hopeless fanboy of the show, we have nothing in common. Other than Facebook, of course, where we are “friends,” after he was referred by our mutual friend Vernon Loeb of The Philadelphia Inquirer. Taking that supplied noun as a permission, I sent Mr. Bissinger a message on Facebook and asked for advice. We got on the phone and I found out exactly, precisely what I wanted to know from, as they say in the Web world, a highly trusted source.

-Michael