She says that social networking sites such as MySpace, YouTube, Friendster, LiveJournal, LinkedIn, Flickr and FaceBook are all attracting thousands of unique users and millions of page impressions from South African users.

Online video portal, YouTube, serves up six million page impressions a month to South African users and has 100,000 unique users from the country.

MySpace generates 12 million monthly page impressions from South Africa and has 160,000 unique South African users.

A range of South African social networking sites have also launched to compete against the international giants. They include MyVideo, ITWeb's My Digital Life and 5FM's BlogJockey blogging platform.

"We're seeing strong uptake of social media in South Africa that reflects the trends in the international market," says Charton.

Social network marketing is one of the fastest growing areas in the global advertising market. According to independent market research firm, eMarketer, US advertisers will spend $900 million on social networks in 2007, up from $350 million in 2006.

MySpace and Facebook are expected to take the lion's share of this spending. Social networking sites and technologies empower users to share opinions, insights, experiences, contacts and content with each other online. Examples of social networking tools include blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, and vlogs.

"Social networking essentially uses technology to facilitate the natural human instinct to forge relationships and share information, ideas, emotions, interests, and content," says Charton. "People use social networking sites to entertain themselves, meet new people, enrich existing relationships with friends and families, and to learn more about products and brands that they like."

“A common misconception is that social networking sites are the exclusive domain of teens and students at leisure. But recent studies show that older people and professionals are also using social networks to forge closer personal and business relationships,” says Charton.

Nearly two-thirds of professionals in the US use social networking Web sites to stay in touch with personal and business contacts, according to a survey by the Institute for Corporate Productivity and HR.com.

Another study in the US by ITtoolbox and PJA Advertising + Marketing found that IT professionals cite social media as the most trustworthy online source of information when making purchasing decisions.

International brands such as Adidas and Electronic Arts have generated massive return on investment from campaigns run on MySpace. Much of the return comes from the so-called “momentum effect”, which comes from “word of mouse” as consumers pass messages on to each other.

“Social networking sites offer advertisers a range of benefits, including the ability to target ads at users according to their interests, demographics and online behaviour,” says Charton. South African brands can target local users on international social networking portals through geo-targeting.

Apart from traditional banner adverts, most social networking portals also allow advertisers to target registered users that fall within a specific demographic such as age group. Companies can sponsor content categories that are aligned with their brands and likely to attract people within their target markets.

Concludes Charton: "Many of Acceleration Media's clients are already experimenting with social media, with great success. For the right brand, devoting some of the online budget to social networking sites can provide great returns."

 

Advertising Breakdown by Industry, June and July 2007
Industry	Total Impressions, July 2007 (M)	Total Impressions, June 2007 (M)	Change From Previous Month (%)
Automotive	9,528.3	6,122.3	55.63
Business-to-business	8,713.4	5,733.5	51.97
Consumer goods	8,558.5	10,817.7	-20.88
Entertainment	8,927.4	6,535.0	36.61
Financial services	95,917.2	83,745.7	14.53
Hardware and electronics	5,412.2	4,215.1	28.40
Health	3,937.9	4,218.0	-6.64
Public services	14,438.8	12,725.4	13.46
Retail goods and services	46,351.5	37,824.4	22.54
Software	5,397.6	4,358.3	23.85
Telecommunications	19,514.0	27,200.6	-28.26
Travel	8,863.2	8,361.9	6.00
Web media	69,272.1	62,475.9	10.88
Source: Nielsen//NetRatings, 2007

Advertising Breakdown by Ad Unit Type, July 2007 (M)
Industry	Flash, Generic	Rich Media	Sponsored Link	Standard Image	Standard Image/Text Link
Automotive	4,730.5	786.1	2,019.0	975.7	1,017.0
Business-to-business	1,102.8	59.6	6,149.5	1,247.9	153.5
Consumer goods	3,500.6	614.6	2,601.3	1,567.5	274.6
Entertainment	1,808.5	519.5	4,678.7	1,475.1	445.6
Financial services	18,650.9	393.3	2,425.7	16,030.9	58,416.5
Hardware and electronics	2,340.5	154.1	1,318.8	442.9	1,156.0
Health	1,628.0	119.1	788.2	1,298.3	104.3
Public services	4,373.0	42.9	2,012.8	3,970.6	4,039.4
Retail goods and services	6,121.8	205.2	19,082.2	7,677.1	13,265.3
Software	1,499.5	166.1	2,349.5	1,114.4	268.2
Telecommunications	11,978.8	122.8	1,260.8	2,947.7	3,203.9
Travel	2,825.2	194.2	2,733.7	2,137.5	972.5
Web media	10,959.4	164.8	22,777.0	7,556.4	27,814.4
Source: Nielsen//NetRatings, 2007

A Media Planning Tool helps you or your outsourced media planners to integrate all your planning needs into one system and automate them. All site selections, RFP’s, proposals, Media Schedules and Insertion Orders are created through the system.

 

This saves time by cutting out the numerous emails, phone calls and faxes usually involved in negotiations, proposals and pricing. Since the publisher must complete all proposals in full before submitting them, there is less chance that certain information the agency needs might not be there.

 

The system cuts down the possibility of error when proposals are manually captured into a spreadsheet. It also frees up the media planner’s time so that he or she is able to focus more on strategy and planning rather than on admin.

 Last week, News Corp. announced that Fox Interactive Media turned its first annual profit on revenue of $550 million. With an estimated 80% of FIM revenue coming from MySpace, that translates to about $440 million in MySpace revenue for the fiscal year, which ended June 30. Almost all of that comes from advertising.

To those who had their doubts about MySpace, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch had this to say during the earnings call: "It wasn't so long ago — 24 months — when many said we were embarking on a fool's errand. In the 12 months prior to our acquiring MySpace, the site generated $23 million in revenue. Today, on the back of its durability and success, we are forecasting that MySpace alone will generate in excess of $800 million in revenue in fiscal '08."

eMarketer has projected that MySpace would generate $525 million in US ad revenue in calendar 2007 and $820 million in 2008. Both of those figures will likely rise when we issue our next social network ad spending forecast later this year.

Three factors will drive increased revenue for MySpace in the near term. It has begun beta-testing a new targeted advertising tool that will significantly increase CPMs. Parent Fox Interactive Media's deal with Google to supply search technology is providing increased revenue. Lastly, MySpace's international business has ramped up significantly.

At Facebook, which lately has stolen a lot of MySpace's thunder, revenue may also surpass our projection of $125 million in 2007. It now has 31 million active users, up from 8.9 million in September 2006, and generates 40 billion page views a month.

Clearly, its deal with Microsoft to sell banner advertising (reportedly contributing $200 million to Facebook's coffers through 2008) is a big revenue driver. (A flap last week over some banner ads appearing on the Facebook page of a British extreme-right-wing group will likely blow over.)

So, all is rosy in social networking, right? Well, not exactly. With banner ads and search deals plowing in a good chunk of revenue for these sites, what happens to the original promise of social network marketing: delivering a message to one person and having that person spread the message to his or her network? That part is still a work in progress.

Marketers are still grappling with how to measure the effectiveness of forming groups; as one commenter recently wrote on the Valleywag blog, "is simply joining a group really driving sales, profits, and metrics that actually matter?"

eMarketer projects that marketers will spend $900 million advertising on social networks in the US this year.

That figure will likely increase, at least in the near term, but if advertisers simply go for the low-hanging fruit of banners and search instead of reaching for the exponential effect of pass-along, much of the promise — and potential — of social networking will be lost.

 

As with any online campaign, it is important to decide upfront what the objectives are for your campaign before choosing an ad network. Ad Networks allow high reach, high volumes at a low cost without the niche targeting of specific placement buying. They are not right for every client and every campaign. They are simply another tactic to consider. It is important to tie your use of ad networks back to your broader online marketing strategy, to ensure that you are getting an optimum mixture of reach and focus from your online budget.

It sounds obvious, but it’s surprising how often this crucial step is omitted. Without clear objectives, the planning process becomes directionless. This is not merely understanding who your target market is (an important part, of course) but how you want them to interact with you and how you will measure this. Do you want them to subscribe to your newsletter, enter that competition or make an online purchase? What are you doing to help them achieve these objectives? How easy is it for clients to interact with you?

 

To get a handle on ROI from an online marketing campaign, you need to know what it will cost you and how effective it is/was. Knowing the costs of an online marketing campaign is relatively easy; calculating its effectiveness less so.

 

Different companies measure effectiveness in different ways. Some say that effectiveness is determined by increases in sales volume (that is, obviously, the most likely response), but others believe that effectiveness is gauged by the number of leads generated by a marketing tactic or program.

 

It gets messier yet - other metrics abound including number of press releases or pieces of mail, number of new customers, number of web hits or visitors, awareness changes (or the extent to which people are more aware of your product), impressions (number of articles in the press multiplied by the potential readership of each publication), content analysis, recall measures, and on and on and on.

 Knowing what you want to achieve with your campaign is the key to measuring effectiveness. Do you want to drive sales volume, web visitors, or what? Once you know that, you will be able to calculate your marketing ROI more accurately.

• Test various combinations of creative size, color, copy and layout to get the best response
• Increase the weight of the combinations that are most successful in terms of the response metric used to measure the success of the campaign (click-through, sign-ups and etc.)
• The offer on the creative should be compelling enough to draw people in

 

Remember, media planners cannot make changes to creative.  It is therefore important to ensure there is a good relationship between planners and creative designers to continually increase response rates on campaigns.

So many online marketers invest heavily in putting together stunning creative and placing their ads on the most popular Web sites, yet don't give a second thought to the page a user will arrive on after he or she has clicked on an ad.

 

It's a good idea to experiment with different landing pages to see which of them are most successful in driving the behavior you want from your audience. All too often users simply end up on your company's home page, left to their own devices to find information about the product advertised in your ad. Does it work best to direct a user to a page that offers detailed product information, or to send the user to a registration form? Which headlines and body content work best out of a set of options? These are questions that are worth asking and answering through experimentation.