Ad targeting company Media6Degrees mines online social connections to deliver advertising to customers as well as the people that are connected to them.

Media6Degrees’ concept of social ad targeting is different than common perceptions, President and CEO Tom Phillips told eMarketer’s senior analyst Debra Aho Williamson today. While not literally social media data, the Web data used to construct custom audiences for brands does come from the social Web.

Instead of constructing audiences based on demographics, Media6Degrees uses "data that comes from connections between prospects and customers." The brand loyalists are seeds that Phillips gets directly from the client. The company technology and algorithms identify an audience based on the connections between the sites that the seeds visit and the sites that other Web browsers visit.

While there is not an explicit connection between two specific people on Facebook, for example, person A may look at content (images, blog posts, etc) from person B, and we may assume there is a connection based on this. "But it could be someone I don’t know; we both end up at the same obscure food blog or political blog or sports blog—or whatever it may be," Phillip clarifies. The data is empirical, and the connections are measured so that the most productive are valued higher in a campaign.

The business functions as a performance ad network, taking advantage of these connections for major marketers’ campaigns. "The two metrics we measure our performance by are view-throughs to site visits and view-throughs to conversions." These metrics are what clients are looking at when they quantify performance.

Media6Connect does not believe they are making demographics obsolete, but that this approach is more important. "If all the trends are in our favor, then we’ll do a better job finding audiences for marketers than the conventional way," Phillips predicts. If Facebook moves beyond demographics to abstracted data, "it would be huge for us."

Marketers are enhancing their email marketing campaigns with social media rather than replacing them, a report shows. The fourth annual Email Marketing Industry Census from Econsultancy and Adestra was released last week, tracking how marketers are using emails to interact with customers.

More companies are using email to encourage customers to share content on social networks, as well as to promote customer ratings and reviews. Budgeting for email marketing is up from last year, and most companies rate email as a great return on investment.

But much difficulty is documented for these companies to send messages that are relevant, as well as craft them so that they actually land in the customer’s inbox. Despite more adoption of email list services (over fifty percent), too many organizations are not paying enough attention to list quality.

• Only 56 percent of companies are using opt-in (43%) or confirmed opt-in (13%) data for their acquisition emails
• Only 60 percent are using opt-in (39%) or confirmed opt-in (21%) data for their retention emails
• Quality of database is cited as a problem for 61 percent of marketers
• List/data quality is a top-three priority in 2010 for only 32 percent of company respondents

“Companies must take care to focus on the relevance of their email in a world where it is becoming increasingly important for brands to demonstrate value, rather than bombarding people with unwanted messages,” says Linus Gregoriadis, Research Director at Econsultancy in the Adestra blog. “Sophisticated segmentation and effective list-cleansing are more important than ever.”

• 39 percent do not understand their ROI from email
• Of those who do, five percent more than last year report over 500 percent ROI
• Most companies do carry out basic segmentation (80%) and regular list-cleansing practices (58%)
• Only seventeen percent have managed to fully integrate their email marketing with other sales and marketing activities, the same as last year.

Ed Kaczmarek, Director of Innovation, Consumer Experiences at Kraft Foods says that the goal of their iFood Assistant smartphone application is to engage the consumer in a meaningful and relevant way. It does this by trying to make life easier and get closer during the point of purchase. He explained further in his eMarketer interview today.

The iFood Assistant first launched in November 2008, and released its 2.0 a year later. $0.99 app has over 7,000 recipes, cooking tips, a shopping list builder and how-to videos with Kraft brand ads. The What’s On Hand search enables the user to type in up to three items and the app will find recipe suggestions for those items.

Kraft promotes the app to consumers through all of its various channels - KraftFoods.com , KraftCanada.com, and a weekly e-mail. But they have concentrated on the mobile ad network, and because of this are able to track actual conversion.

Integration of the app with KraftFoods.com enables users to access their iFood Assistant information, recipe box and shopping list on the Web site as well. This usability gives the iFoods platform a social hook, since users can e-mail recipes or shopping lists to themselves or friends. So far, members cannot upload their own recipes, but push notifications means that users can set reminders of Recipe of the Day or Dinner Tonight, and they receive the announcements even when the app is off.

Kraft Foods does not share download information, but their numbers show sixty percent engagement after six months. This is compared to about five percent continued engagement after two months, in Kraft’s own statistics.

The customers that actually use the app were surprising to Kaczmarek. About 25 percent of users are men. "Also, over 90% of the people signing in to the iFood Assistant are new to the Kraft Foods environment." He observes that "when people share recipes, they definitely e-mail them more than they send them via text message."

Target shoppers can now receive coupons directly sent to their mobile phones via an opt-in service. Smartphones have been able to provide this service for quite some time, but the first national chain to exploit them has announced their plan.

To receive the service from Target, savings-enthusiasts can either go to http://m.target.com or text COUPONS to 827438. Once a member, the shopper receives a text message consisting of a link to a mobile web page that contains multiple offers, all accessible from a single barcode. This barcode is single-use and expires on an indicated date.

The strategy takes advantage of two trends - coupon use is on the rise since our economy took a dive, and the uses of mobile phones is expanding into more categories than ever. But this is the first time that a national chain store has committed to such a program, and is currently the only one that can scan these codes at the register.

Every month, new coupons will be made available on Target’s mobile site as old ones expire. The savings can be used at any Target retail store, but CNET reports that they cannot be used at Target.com. While there is no explanation for this service omission on the press release, the general intention of the program is to make mobile coupons a seamless experience. “At Target, we know that mobile phones are an integral part of our guests’ lives, and mobile coupons are just another way we’re providing convenient, on-the-go shopping solutions,” said Steve Eastman, president of Target.com.

CNET mentions also that J.C. Penny is currently testing a similar program.

Brad Gilligan of NPR’s blog sighs with relief at the idea of no longer having to clip magazines to get savings. In addition to the mobile coupons, Target is expanding its mobile support to include gift card access, product viewing and availability, gift registry and other functions.

Challenge: Chat Roulette. "Going Where No Manly Man Has Gone Before."

So reads the prompt from Manifesto, the menswear blog from UK clothing line French Connection for a contest in which participants are asked to document their online flirting. Initially restricted to men, the opportunity to win 250 pounds for captured evidence of success or fail was opened up to women as well.

The first marketing ploy to use this popular but chaotic Web site, FCUK’s efforts could easily go awry or be well rewarded. Chatroulette’s simple design of pairing two strangers in video chat has made it extremely popular for the past few weeks since it made appearances in a number of US news sources, such as Good Morning America, New York Magazine, and The Daily Show. A button labeled "next" lets either user change the channel on whomever they have been paired with, a proto-Circuit from Logan’s Run.

The pairing seems very appropriate - as ReadWriteWeb reports, Chatroulette’s visitors are typically 71 percent male, 15 percent female, and 14 percent pervert. With a blog that defines its readers’ manliness by how much meat they eat and how little gel they put in their hair, there is much potential user overlap between the two sites.

Realistically, associating with such a site - where the odds of meeting someone strange or seeing something disturbing are quite high - could be risky, but FCUK could be trying for just such a distinction. Since Chatroulette’s inception in November 2009, much of the press as mentioned above has mainly covered that seedy, deer-head-wearing demographic of its user base.

As interviewed by the New York Times’ Bits Blog, 17 year old Andrey Ternovskiy from Moscow says he created Chatroulette for himself and his friends. Tired of talking to each other on Skype, his idea to connect randomly with strangers manifested itself in the current phenomenon.

What if you could feed a monkey, donate a meal to the homeless, plant a tree or deliver a life-saving vaccination to people just by adding an app to your smartphone?

CauseWorld was designed for that. Owners of iPhones and Androids open the app, go to nearby stores (indicated by GPS) and earn “karma points,” which they can donate to the charity or the cause of their choice — even if they don’t buy a thing at the store. Since the app’s December launch, companies like P&G, City Bank and Kraft have donated more than 400,000 dollars for causes, which is huge.

Some skeptics will say that this is just another way for multinationals in need of good publicity to make themselves look good. We can’t say the skeptics are wrong, but still.

This simple application is unique. It is the only one to add a charity dimension to geolocalization and shopping apps by using virtual money. Causeworld converts its currency, “karmas,” into real dollars with real impact. So why use Foursquare, Gowala or brightkite to communicate your location and find stores if you can do the same, and much more, with this app?

Causeworld has a very simple business model. Its monetization is based on a background in the retail industry: companies are ready to pay a little to have clients entering their shop.

The app seems to be quite a success, as in two months more than 300,000 people have downloaded it. It is one way  to do something good while you shop and for the retail companies to convert individuals into customers. But what’s important at the end is more than the click on your phone, it’s that you helped.

At least one industry can expect only a couple more years of sluggish growth, projects AMR International’s "Online B2B Marketing in the United States: Assessment and Forecast to 2013," released February. While growth in the category is forecast at eight percent for this year, it is expected to reach fourteen percent by 2012.

Online marketing will be growing, but some sections will do better than others. Business-to-business "advertising spend on social media and lead generation sites is forecast to grow at an annualized rate" of 21 percent and seventeen percent respectively to 2013.

The marketing mixture of targets for B2B showed an improvement for online since 2008, which only accounted for seven percent that year. In 2013, this is set to reach twelve percent.

While more allocation of strategy and budget are being shifted to different types of online tools, marketers do not plan to marginalize traditional marketing activities. In fact, two-thirds of mentioned marketers believe online must be complemented with just such activities.

In addition, B2B online and offline marketing budget was analyzed by objective. As shown in eMarketer’s additional coverage of the report, in the Fall of 2009, building awareness was the highest priority for combined online and offline budget at 38 percent, with 28% for online only.

Lead generation is the higher online priority, and garnered the highest percentage of online marketing budget, at 38 percent. It received 34 percent of the combined budget.

The lowest combined budget was for customer retention at 28 percent, but a middle-performer for online marketing at 34 percent.

In the same time period, 68 percent of business-to-business marketers who analyze metrics or statistics agree that paid search is effective at lead generation. Of those who are not familiar with the measurements, only 31 percent agreed, and 62 percent were neutral on the question. Between those who use metrics and those who do not, the population was split 50-50.

Companies are changing the way that they interact with consumers by shifting marketing strategies from pushing out to pulling in. These strategies, called "Inbound Marketing," are characterized by techniques that use the Internet and media to determine what products and services best meet consumers’ needs.

"Inbound marketers offer useful information, tools and resources to attract these people to their site," while they use the web to develop relationships with customers. These inbound marketing tools include blogging, content publishing, search engine optimization, social media and social networks.

Hubspot’s 2010 State of Inbound Marketing, released February 16th, determined these key findings:

Inbound marketing results in far lower cost-per-sales than outbound channels.

When marketing budget majority goes to inbound marketing, responses showed a sixty percent lower cost-per-sales than those who spent more on outbound marketing. Businesses are shifting their budget allocations in respect to this, so that 37 percent is now dedicated to inbound marketing, and only thirty percent is dedicated to outbound marketing efforts. Hubspot expects the difference to increase over time.

Blogs are more important to businesses than other social media categories.

That cost-per-lead effectiveness showed 55 percent of company blogs to be less expensive in 2009. 48 percent of organic and natural search engine optimization rated below average cost-per-lead, while only 32 percent of paid search or AdWords performed similarly.

More companies that use inbound marketing have acquired customers from these channels.

From between 41 and 46 percent of companies that used social media marketing channels had acquired a customer this way. For business-to-business firms, LinkedIn performed higher than any other site - 45 percent, with the company blog, Twitter and Facebook in declining order. For business-to-consumer companies, Facebook performed best (68 percent), followed by the company blog (57%), then Twitter (51%), and last by quite a bit, LinkedIn (26%).

In video ad network YuMe’s recent analysis of their numbers, they found that the different ad formats had their own strengths and weaknesses. In the YuMe Video Ad Metrics January 2010 report, twelve months of key data and trends from in-stream video across their own network. YuMe served over three billion video ad impressions from January 2009 to December 2009.

Top in-stream video advertising spending categories were Auto at 18 percent and consumer packaged goods. CPG Household ranked second at 15.4 percent, beauty third at 10.1 percent.

By far the majority in YuMe online video ads were pre-roll commercials - rising from 81.5 percent to 92.6 percent throughout the year. While overlays made up over ten percent of all video ads in the fiscal year’s first quarter, and in-banners nearly eight percent, the rise of pre-rolls squeezed them both down to less than two percent in the fourth quarter. Custom ads rose from practically zero in Q1 to over four percent by Q4.

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Part 2 of ChoiceStream’s 2009 Personalization Survey was released this week, showing that consumers found online product recommendations less useful last year than 2008.

Other findings were published by the recommendations service provider, who works with big brands such as Tesco, Zappos.com and more. The decrease in credibility for consumers is specified by retail category.

Overall, 31 percent more online shoppers received poor quality recommendations in 2009 than the 45 percent in 2008. Most respondents said that quality was poor because suggested products were unrelated to what they were looking for.

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