Guest comment: Monetising social media- Join the conversation

Social networks are here to stay, that much we know. Human beings are ‘social’ creatures that want to share their ideas, plans, intentions and emotions. People want to connect and engage with other people and social networks create powerful environments for this to happen. But one of the biggest challenges facing brands today is how to effectively monetise these social properties.

According to the latest figures from Hitwise (Feb 2009), Facebook is the second most popular website in the UK behind Google, with 17.6 million unique users in the UK.  Access to the huge audience and rich user data that social networks offer makes them very appealing to brands, but how can firms unlock this potential? The key to monetising social networks lies in engagement. Not some sort of superficial ‘brand’ engagement, but in deep, personal engagement through real dialogue with users. Brands need to be joining the conversation – but to do that, they first need to understand the conversation. They need to understand what is being discussed, where, when and how.

Sophisticated understanding

Easy to say, not so easy to do. Publishers have been looking at advertising as a means of monetising social networks for some time now, but high-profiled bungled attempts such as Facebook's Beacon highlight the challenges they face.  A key barrier is the way users think about social networks - people see their online space as something quite private and this, coupled with a lot of media attention around online privacy, has led people to have an emotional reaction towards advertising on social media networks which is both immediate and negative. This is an understandable, and yet unreasonable reaction - social networks are ultimately providing a service that needs to be paid for. Just like TV. Just like radio.

The trick lies in understanding the conversation that is raging and engaging the user with highly relevant, targeted advertising that actually enhances the user experience. Understanding the conversation is not about identifying keywords. It has to be much more sophisticated than that. If someone is talking enthusiastically about going skiing in France in March, they will react positively to skiing advertising and specific ski travel offers. If, however, they are talking about how they hate the cold weather and just don’t understand why their friends spend money on skiing and winter holidays, those same skiing ads will have the opposite effect. This creates an experience that is bad for the user and bad for the advertiser. That’s why the technology used to understand the conversation and to serve the ad must be sophisticated. Just latching onto the keyword ‘skiing’ is not sufficient. And that’s why current efforts are falling short.

Fear of the unknown

The sheer volume of largely unregulated content makes it very challenging for publishers to monetise social networks. Brands want to participate, but they simply can't afford to take the risk of exposure next to offensive or inappropriate user generated content. What’s the solution? Once again, understand the conversation. If you can really understand what’s being discussed – dynamically, as the content is actually being created and as the conversation is actually evolving – then you can make instantaneous decisions whether or not to serve an ad at all – and, if so, which ads, which creative and which promotion to serve.

 The opportunity presented by social networks is too large for brands to ignore. They want and need to participate. To make this happen, publishers must provide advertisers with insights into the meaning of all the content on their site. Only by having a true understanding of content can brands engage users with relevant and useful ads that enhance – not detract – from the user experience. Amplify is the only technology available today that can understand the meaning of content in real time, and provide ad servers with the information they need to ensure highly relevant, premium ads are served to users based on their own expressed interests, desires and intentions.

Top tips for publishers

The key to monetising social media from a publisher’s perspective is to understand your content! Arm online advertisers with a full appreciation of the meaning of text – so go beyond existing tools that rely on categorising content according to keywords or assessing brand safety based on samples of content. Move to Natural Language Processing and computational linguistic technologies that are available today and which can surface the significant topics, attitudes and pending decisions within any text to remove the guesswork from brand safety and targeting decisions and enable social networks to realise their financial potential.

by Mark Redgrave

CEO

Amplify

www.openamplify.com/