Andrew Young's Blog

It remains a hot topic for promoters on social media channels how well they integrate their ads into the social media. It isn’t a new debate marketers have faced before but as online channels become significantly more popular, some customers feel deceived when they learned the content they were learning was actually an advertisement. Based on recent research, customers were most outraged when a sponsored video appeared to look like the content they were seeking. While it does draw some concerns, marketers and customers remain at odds on what advertisements actually work. On Facebook, customers have sometimes been mislead by sponsored stories and on Twitter, some customers don’t realize the difference between promoted tweets. Recently, Facebook has stepped up the effort by enabling an option to pay money to have your own post appear higher on the news feed.

On the other side, marketers find integrating ads seamlessly into the online environment is an effective way of reaching out to the customer. Many events hosted in Facebook seem to be popular method of integrated advertising as well as targeted post advertisements.A recent report showed 20% of Facebook marketers favored sponsored stories as a way to reach customers.

Personally, I feel that customers believe social media is more private and that advertising in general is already perceived as a negative.what makes online social media ads different than say a magazine with a sponsored story? Social Media is still in its infancy and many are still used to other forms of ads like TV commercials. Customers may feel unprepared for being personally bombarded with the precision of demographic targeted ads. I feel marketers have every right to try to make their ads appeal to the right customers. The increasing trend towards transparency and managing data that has restricted people ability to handle privacy and the blurring of the lines creates confusion on this particular channel.When you sign up a social media account, you are placing you own information, it is almost expected that you will be bombarded with ads since you are joining a free service. While it is certainly tense moment for this time period, the next generation of people may not care as much about these privacy concerns as they will grow up and become desensitized to these ads.

2 years ago, Groupon was considered the love child of the Wall Street market. A new up and comer company that had defined itself by offering heavily discounted coupons in large batches. Google had even approached the firm to acquire it.

However, times have fallen hard on Groupon and now its share price is fraction of what it once was so what gives? I believe one of the big things about Groupon is that its business model is unstable and easily copyable by any firm. Since the business is completely online, many coupon aggregators were very similar and Groupon lost a lot of competitive advantages. Another big reason is the negative publicity and how Groupon initially handled comments online. They lacked proper monitoring and triage to really understand the issues that some companies mishandled their coupon. Some businesses were forced to sacrafice quality and had to expand capacity to meet demand

Another reason I think Groupon’s model doesn’t work is that the intense price decrease of email coupons make the consumer behave differently. Consumers devalue the brand and the intense decrease in price promote them to withhold purchases of a product in lieu of a potential coupon. The newsletter sign-up process make it much easier to wait and just receivethe daily deals.

Pinterest has been one of the more recent social media to pick up heat but is it worth it for business to invest in another form of social media. Pinterest thinks so! They have recently moved to adding separate business and personal accounts which mimic how Facebook allowed different accounts before. This is seen by many as a move to monetize their services.

But back to why it may be worth it to invest in Pinterest. The concept is simple: pin your interest onto your wall which often sounds pretty simple. However, research shows Pinterest users show a stark contrast than ordinary users like Facebook. Pinterest users are more likely to brand loyal consumer to the things they post and are more active in terms of contests and feedback. Its photo layout is also appealing to companies that don’t have time for long blurbs or contests but have an awesome camera. While the Pinterest population is small in comparison in Facebook, small to mid size business may find a liking to Pinterest as a method to separate themselves from a sea of Facebook groups and Linkedin pages. While it may not lead directly to purchases, these pictures sure can stir up some conversation.

Its official, Facebook is entering the realm of job search in a effort to make Facebook users spend more time on Facebook to generate more revenue.  Prior to the jobs board, LinkedIn dominated the job search social media market and many firms continue to flock to the channel to actively recruit firms. Linkedin’s business model is also significantly more acceptable to the average investor but now Facebook has expanded into the job search realm may have firms second guess where to allocate resources.

Facebook has now designed a interactive jobs board that integrates a number of recruiting sites like monster.com and Work4Labs to massive conglomerate of jobs that exceed 1.7 million openings. It may have a large enough draw for potential recruiters to start looking into those ads. It represents an amazing opportunity to monetize a portion of the search and promote Facebook ads which haven’t quite proven themselves as a solid revenue stream. It also moves Facebook into an almost all in one service that could rival the likes of Google one day if people keep spending significantly more time to social media.

While Facebook claims its not hitting the recruitment market, it is certainly true that our social profiles and platforms continue to become more integrated. Better start guessing which profile picture to choose from.