Facebook

Connecting Across Social Networks

by Warren Whitlock on December 14, 2009 · 8 comments

I’ve been experimenting with a couple of tools that bridge databases to make it easier to reach friends and contacts where they want to be reached.

We’ll have an update on this weeks Social Media Radio Show.. including some stats on what social networks have the best connections and how one site promises to get 43% of your email list to open an email (unheard of on some mailing lists today).

With Facebook opening profiles to the search engines by default, this is going to get easier. I think that soon we’ll be able to talk directly to a contact in exactly the way they want to hear from us.. Text, Tweet, Post or Email. In the mean time, let’s make it easier to show where we want to be reached.

BusinessCard2 is trying to do that. I just updated my entry. You can get your own there free.

How effective are the ads on social networks?

by Warren Whitlock on December 8, 2007 · 0 comments

As it stands, Facebook does not know all that much about us, and the ads that we are shown are not relevant as a result. The jury is still out on whether social networks can get big via highly targeted advertising. Early trials have shown that CPC is not a likely route and CPM plays are just not as interesting. Yet, Facebook is certainly very aggressively pushing for monetization, likely in preparation for a future IPO. Will they be able to turn it all around and re-invent contextual advertising? The company is full of brilliant people so it’s certainly possible, but so far it does not look impressive.