Real Fresh TV | Specialists in Social Commerce and Social Media Marketing

Our study of social media usage amongst FTSE 100 companies continues to attract readers.

It has been added to social bookmarking site StumbleUpon and internet marketing social site Sphinn and was recently picked up by social media industry blog, Social Media Today.

Yesterday it was covered by SinoTech Media, one of China’s largest digital marketing agencies in a blog post reviewing the surging mainstream interest in social media.

Here’s what they had to say:

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Alex Iskold over on popular technology blog, Read/WriteWeb has just published a thought-provoking piece on the myth of contextual advertising on social networks like Facebook.

By ‘contextual’ advertising, he is referring to advertising that is served to the user based on information the advertiser has about him or her.

He does not think the contextual ‘Social Ads’ on Facebook work very well because of “[Facebook’s] lack of understanding of its users.”

His argument is that Facebook does not know enough about him to serve relevant ads (or does not appear to use the information it knows about him effectively enough to serve relevant ads) because much of its information is unstructured.

Now, I’m no computer scientist but I beg to differ.

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Social media brands YouTube and Wikipedia have entered Nielsen Online’s list of the top 10 most popular internet brands in the UK, at the expense of Real and AOL.

Here’s the two page report from Nielsen Online which also reports that Facebook accounts for the two of the fastest growing online brands in the UK: RockYou! and Slide.

RockYou! and Slide are heavily used by Facebookers – particularly 18-24 year old women – to organise photo slideshows, according to Nielsen Online.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise.

YouTube is now the UK’s fourth most popular commercial media brand.

According to Nielsen Online, its audience has grown 84% over the last year to almost 10 million unique users – almost one in every three UK users online use YouTube.

There is also a strong performance from Facebook which has grown a massive 1,647%, from less than half a million UK users to almost eight million, in just 12 months.

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This article is the fourth in a series of articles exploring the future of social advertising.

Click on the ‘Social Advertising’ tag to read earlier posts/articles.

The last post presented the notion of branded content as “the next big thing in social media” and put forward the proposition that brands are better off looking at engaging directly with consumers over branded content on the major social networking sites than creating standalone social media sites if they are promoting new products or services.

In this post, I expand on the potential pitfalls involved with engaging directly with consumers online using social advertising.

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The second extension of the deadline for the first British iPhone Giveaway to midnight on Friday 16th November has inspired some interesting comments including this one which suggested that extending the deadline and implementing a fairer entry system would damage the competition’s credibility.

My response to that is that the competition is still open and the prize still up for grabs.

The deadline extension does not penalise anyone who has already entered.

This is an important point.

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Neilsen Online, the new name for services previously marketed under the Nielsen//NetRatings and Nielsen BuzzMetrics brands) has just published a report on online video consumption in the UK.

Here are the significant points (excerpted from the report which you can download here).

My comments in italics.

Almost 21 million Britons visited a TV, video or movie-related website in Sept 07 – a 28% increase in visitors since Sept 06.

The TV/Video/Movie sector online is now visited by 63% of Britons online; up from 55% in Sept 06 – a growth rate of 15%.

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We are already getting some very interesting entries in the competition to give away a UK iPhone on Friday.

JC, the first entrant would like to “watch Dr Who on his iPhone”. Interesting.

I would like to watch anything by Sir Richard Attenborough, come to think of it.

Wonder if the BBC is listening.

The Blue Planet nature series was awesome. Watching that on long car/coach/train/plane journeys would be an absolute joy…

There’s also a request for the Father Ted, IT crowd and other Channel 4 gems. I hear you, Toby Spanton. There’s more entries pouring in…

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Server side site visitor detection software has linked clicks to user actions since the advent of the web.

Online video advertising is therefore intrinsically measurable, it is argued.

Well, the jury is out on that.

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