Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

A Social Media Insider’s Recap of 2009

Originally published in MediaPost


Amazingly, some highlights from this year had nothing to do with photogenic cats.

A Social Media Insider’s Recap of 2009

Assuming you’re working this week, hopefully you have some time to catch up. If you’ll indulge me, I’ve rounded up what I’d consider the highlights from the past year of my contributions here.

For me, 2009 started with a dramatic change in perspective, as I transitioned from the Search Insider to the Social Media Insider after 224 editions of the former. In the first ten weeks of the year, I largely explored how search and social connected. I noted the value of community-powered retail search engines and bathroom search engines and search engines to help with a move, showed why Skittles overhauled its own Web site (a column so tenuously related to search that I almost didn’t submit it), and made a plea for Google to incorporate Twitter’s content. The Twitter column concluded, “At some point… Google will need live search. When Google's ready, the question will be whether any scalable live search platform needs Google.” Sure enough, Twitter needed Google, and such a partnership was one of few revenue streams for Twitter this year.

That was just in the first 15 columns. The next 32 (not including this one) were part of the Social Media Insider, where I got to join the inimitable Cathy Taylor. Here are some columns and topics that resonated.

Best Practices

This is one of the most tempting areas to cover, but it’s always a risk to sound too professorial or even too obvious. One from May that managed to work was a treatise against the “c-word” (campaign). Especially after an email exchange with a reader, I wanted to write a rebuttal to show when campaigns make sense for social media. I never got to it, so there’s one I can consider for 2010.

Pricing

As a thought experiment, I proposed a new pricing model: CPSA, or cost per social action. I can’t say it’s an industry standard yet, but the dialogue on MediaPost and elsewhere was reward enough.

Mobile

I love diving into mobile, even if I’m no Steve Smith. Some mobile coverage came up when looking into mobile apps, including a broad look earlier and then the recent tongue in cheek example of Cat Paint. The most popular in this category shared research from AdMob on mobile social network usage.

Personal

Personal stories run the risk of turning a trade column into Reader’s Digest if done too often, but when they work they’re easy to relate to. My mother-in-law continues to amaze me with her Twitter prowess, even if she had to take a hiatus in the fall when her netbook was in the shop; her nearly 900 followers are happy to have her back. Travelers and Los Angeles readers appreciated social media’s impact on my Labor Day vacation. I also got nostalgic for my camp counselor days, and it turns out I wasn’t alone with such experiences.

Atonement

As proof that ideas literally come from everywhere, I attempted an acrostic inspired by one of the most famous prayers said on Judaism’s Day of Atonement. It wasn’t too much of a stretch to come up with 26 ways marketers sin using social media; I’ve had to ask forgiveness for at least a couple of these myself.

Top Ten Lists

If I learned anything from digg, it’s that top ten lists are easier to read, and when they work they’re fun to write. I shared top ten lists on claiming social media domains, corporate tweeting, social graph ad targeting, and most recently how social media changed our thinking this year. I wasn’t stuck on the number ten though: there were five ways to use Twitter lists, six ways to improve conferences, and twelve reasons to look at Google Wave (admittedly the Wave hype was premature).

Measurement

A bit of advice: if you’re going to attempt a top 100 list, you better be able to get there. I’ve been working on one for my blog for months, and I’m stuck in the 70s. The 100 ways to measure social media came together much faster, and I still see it tweeted on occasion.

Thanks to everyone who commented on, emailed, tweeted, blogged, and inspired these columns this year. Most importantly, thanks for sharing what’s most valuable to you – the time you spent reading these. My resolution is to continue to try and respect your time in the year ahead, and I look forward to all the conversations that these contributions trigger.

Happy New Year, and may a healthful and prosperous 2010 await us all.

Book Review - dberkowitz, the Microbiography - by Twitter, 140bio, and David Berkowitz

"A page tweeter." - Evan Williams

"Like Twitter, but on paper." - Jack Dorsey

"So many characters, and yet so little characterization." - Biz Stone

"Shaqulous." - @The_Real_Shaq

Yes, these are some of the reviews I'd love to get for my new book.

 

Oh, did I not mention I was published? It's quite the achievement. See, what I did was I tweeted a lot, a few thousand times even, over a few years. Then I went to 140bio.com and entered my Twitter name, and then from there logged in to PayPal. I paid all of $18.99, and a week later, a book arrived with 3,200 of my tweets, and some other personalization.

The book itself is a marvel for what it doesn't have:

• A plot
• Coherence
• Any real reason to exist

It does have paper though. And a lot of words. And, if I averaged 110 characters a tweet (really rough guess), it has over 350,000 characters.

It also has a record of most of my tweets. It just missed the first few of mine. To think if I found the site a month or two earlier, or I had tweeted just a bit less, it would have captured them all. But I do have almost all of it.

And I have a fun novelty for the office.

And a great gift idea, which I've already sent to someone I know who will get a kick out of it.

It's not a tour de force, and I'm not sure how well it will do on Amazon's charts. I won't even read the thing. But still, it's one of the best books I've bought in a long time.

  

 

Ten Ways Social Media Changed Our Thinking in 2009

Image via Wikipedia

Originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

All the top trend lists this year have been a blur. There's lots of talk of Twitter and Michael Jackson, but I wanted to dive deeper and think about what we really learned. In many ways social media managed to change our thinking about what happened, what's going on, and how the world's changing.

I'll focus on 10 ways in particular. Not all are exclusive to the past year, but many of the milestones from the past 12 months may well shape how we perceive the road ahead.

Democracy: The Green Revolution, Iran's populist attempt to reject the summer's election results, was a global eye-opener for how a tool like Twitter -- so easily dismissed as frivolous -- could change the world. The result may have been underwhelming, with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad maintaining power -- but for those who saw the tweets from Iranians, often retweeted wildly, it will leave its mark. Contrast this with other movements, such as when Philippines voters used text messages to mobilize and oust President Joseph Estrada in 2001. The Philippines revolution followed a peer-to-peer model. In Iran, though, the tweets were largely public, and instant commentary on those tweets was publicized further, shattering the barriers between those who were taking part and the spectators hanging on every character.

Death: We now mourn in public. Michael Jackson inspired millions -- billions? -- to grieve openly. I stayed silent on Jackson but had to express public disbelief over Billy Mays' passing. As I write this, friends and strangers are opening up about Brittany Murphy. The self-expression becomes more problematic when it gets personal, as a Floridian mom learned when she tweeted about her son drowning. This led to the headline " Twitter played no role in drowning of military_mom's son Bryson." We don't yet know how to grieve publicly, and many such as military_mom will learn that others aren't ready for it. But in time, perhaps even by this time next year, stories like this won't be newsworthy.

Sales: Dell has tracked over $6.5 million in revenue to Twitter. There are several  morals to the story: 1) It's possible to track sales from Twitter. 2) It's still in its infancy; Dell earned $61 billion last year, so its Twitter sales will barely cover the Post-it notes used at the 75,000+ employee company. 3) Those are only the direct sales, and every time the press reports on Dell's model, some consumers will go to Dell's outlet site without bothering to check what's happening on Twitter. Bottom line, though, social media is making an impact on sales, and this year we finally started to measure that effect in earnest.

Searching: Google, Yahoo, and Bing committed to giving real-time search valuable real estate in their results pages. Sometimes it will be higher up and sometimes further down, and it will surely be much bigger than Twitter, but now it's here. Most people aren't going to think to search Twitter or Facebook or Foursquare, but they will visit Google or Yahoo or Bing, and they'll access the real-time links if they're relevant. We're still learning when it's relevant, but there's little doubt now that it matters.

Local marketing: So, how did you find out about that restaurant? Did you see a special for mayors on Foursquare? Did a friend check in via Gowalla and share it as their Facebook status? Were you walking down the street with your iPhone out while you augmented reality with Yelp's Monocle or Urbanspoon's Scope? Okay, augmented reality may be more gimmicky, but the social services are starting to help people find each other -- and help people find local hot spots. The fusion of mobile, social and local started to create real opportunities to change consumer behavior. What was true for early adopters in 2009 will apply to the fast followers in the year ahead.

Celebrity Access: In January, Ashton Kutcher joined Twitter. He was followed by Ellen DeGeneres in March and Oprah in April. We got to see what they saw, from Chris Brown's view of 90,000 fans in Manila to Chad Ochocinco's view of his opponents' football field. Vin Diesel posts a couple of times a month on his Facebook page, where he has over 7 million fans. And after Kanye West started a new Internet meme by grabbing the microphone from Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards, he apologized on his blog. Yes, we have ghost tweeters and plenty of opacity, but now that fans have this direct, personal, and occasionally even unfiltered access, it's not going away.

Fan participation: This summer, two amazing events happened in the arts world simultaneously. Here in the U.S., the rock band Of A Revolution (O.A.R.) crowd-sourced song lyrics on Twitter, crediting fans for their contributions to the song that became "Light Switch Sky." Meanwhile, London's Royal Opera crowd-sourced lyrics to an opera through Twitter. In the process, Twitter became a curation tool, and both curators here used other forms of digital media such as blogs and online video to further engage fans. Want to hook your fans? Give them a stake in the content.

Gift giving: Thought you were doing something special for a Facebook friend by giving them one of those little icons as a gift? How about giving them something they'd be really excited about, like an MP3, a charitable donation, or a "gourmet feast" gift basket? Yeah, that last one runs $85, but they are your friends, right? Today, those goods are provided through the Real Gifts application. Tomorrow, it may well be Amazon. What I'd really love to see is gift recommendations tailored to recipients' profile interests right when you're sending something virtual or physical.

News-sourcing: Journalists were among the first to embrace Twitter. Will they similarly lead the charge with Google Wave? They're starting to, anecdotally at least. Mashable loves covering these stories, from the Seattle Times posting a Wave to find a suspected cop killer to town squares hosted by the Austin American-Statesman. Google Wave itself may or may not be the platform of the future, but it's opened the door to news ways for the media to interact with their audience.

Gaming: In November 2009, over 6 million gamers (and their loved ones) bought the blockbuster "Modern Warfare 2." That same month, about 70 million gamers played "Farmville." I know I'm stretching comparisons here, but the notion of what a blockbuster game is continues to shift. Is it a game that millions of people pay $50 for right when it comes out, or a free game played by tens of millions of people, where a small percentage pay small sums over time for in-game upgrades? There's room for both models, and there's room for new thinking on what a successful game is.

That's just a taste of how our thinking changed this year, and it only leaves me hungrier for the new perspectives ahead in 2010.

Cat-Painting A Mobile Social Future

"I'm going to write my next column on Cat Paint," I told my wife.

She asked, "Is it about how you've become a twelve-year-old girl?"

Perhaps. But in a season of social media breakthroughs and brouhahas -- Facebook Connect surpassing 60 million active users, Google and Yahoo rolling out real-time search, Facebook's privacy overhaul, Twitter's Citysearch partnership -- I think we're all going to look back at this time and realize what mattered most was Cat Paint.

You might have missed the big news of Cat Paint releasing and then upgrading its iPhone app. After all, Compete says Catpaint.info attracted fewer than 1,500 unique visitors in November. To offer full disclosure, I have no personal connection to Cat Paint, they have never even recognized my existence (outside of posting one of my submissions in their gallery), and I'm more of a dog person. Yet, when they updated their iPhone app, they offered catnip for those who want to understand what the future of mobile social media looks like.

I first became aware of this breakthrough the old-fashioned way, via word of mouth, during an emerging media breakfast at my agency. Yes, Katty told Jeff, and Jeff told the group, and now I won't shut up about it. The app is deceptively simple: you take any photo on your iPhone and put cats on it. Note that mankind's best inventions -- the wheel, paper clips, red velvet cupcakes -- are all easy to grasp. All impacted the world. So will Cat Paint.

I got so hooked on the app that I created a Flickr gallery with some of my creations. Here are a few reasons everyone can learn from it:

1)      It's easy. What does Cat Paint do? The most obvious answer is that you use it to paint cats. But the second most obvious answer is that you paint a picture with cats -- the cats are really the paint. You don't get a quicker elevator pitch than that. The value proposition is clear.

2)      It has a revenue model. I'm not sure if this is the best 99 cents I ever spent, but it's up there. Facebook can afford not to charge for its app or run ads on it, but mobile social media will increasingly cost consumers. Many kinds of content providers will benefit from the one-two punch of consumers getting used to micropayments for mobile applications and extra features in Web-based applications. When movie tickets cost over $10 and Wii games cost $50, spending a few dollars for a few hours of portable fun seems perfectly frugal and recession-friendly.

3)      There are clear calls to action. When you're done making a Cat Paint picture, you can save it (presumably to show others later), email it to share it right away, submit it to the Cat Paint gallery, or visit the gallery to view others' creations. Almost all of those actions are social, and really, who's going to use this just to keep it all to oneself?

4)      It takes advantage of the mobile handset. With any mobile social app, publishers and marketers need to determine what really makes it mobile. Does it take advantage of GPS? Does it connect to other nearby devices? Does it use the accelerometer? Does it use the phone? Cat Paint uses the camera, allowing users to take instant pictures that can be played with and shared. It's not just some app that can run anywhere; it belongs on a mobile device.

5)      It involves cats. That's just not fair to every other app out there that isn't cat-related.  

The app could improve even more, though. Here are a few potential enhancements for future editions:

1)      Adding in Facebook Connect. I wish I could instantly share these pictures on Facebook, though I can post them if I first save them to my phone. I made one Cat Paint creation myFacebook profile picture, and Connect could make all of this far simpler.

2)      Crowd-source cats. Why not have users submit pictures of their own cats to include in future editions?

3)      Branded cat placements. Perhaps marketers will want to "adopt" or sponsor certain cats. Who'd bite? Maybe Friskies, or Tony the Tiger, or "The Lion King" on Broadway. Or a brand that just likes sponsoring cats. Sponsoring this kind of sharable content has a huge upside for marketers that find the right fit in terms of the app and consumers.

4)      Add cats for a fee. If someone would pay 99 cents to send cat photos, would they pay another buck for a totally new round of cats? I probably would, as it'd be one more excuse to talk about this app and share it with even more people.

I can't guarantee you'll find Cat Paint as amazing as I did. My wife has spent the past week rolling her eyes at me, and my almost-uncle (long story) spent half the family holiday party begging me to put away my iPhone. Regardless of your taste, give Cat Paint a look. Instead of the concept launching as a blog on TypePad or Tumblr as it might have in years past, it works perfectly as a mobile social media app. And if it appears in one of Apple's TV spots, it might even sell a few more iPhones.

Social Integration: Harmonizing Social Channels event (partner plug)

 MarketersStudio.com is a media sponsor of this event. I'll also be attending. You can read my full media sponsorship policy.

For more information, including registration, please click here to visit the event website. Use promo code MSS before December 16th for a discounted rate of $155.

Date: Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Time: 8:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.
Location: The Graduate Center / CUNY; 365 Fifth Avenue; New York, NY 10016 
Registration Fee: $195
Website: http://www.bdionline.com/socialintegration.html 

 

 

About the Event:

It is becoming old news that marketers and communicators are increasingly using social media and social networking to achieve their goals. Just about everyone has experimented and learned from one-off social projects. Now the question is how do you incorporate social channels as part of an integrated marketing, communications, and service platform? This conference will demonstrate case studies of how leading brands are integrating social media and social networking into and across the enterprise. We will approach the topic from the communicator/marketer's perspective but technology, customer service, and operations professionals are welcome to participate. We will also host moderated interactive roundtable discussion groups that will address very specific topics and questions related to social integration.

We will address the following questions:

• What are the best case studies of how leading brands incorporate social media and networking as part of an integrated marketing, communications and service platform?
• What are the proven technologies and tools that help organizations integrate social channels?
• Why is social customer service rapidly becoming a strategic advantage for companies that embrace it and who is doing it well?
• How do leading companies organize themselves to integrate social channels into their communications platform?
• What are the best practices for social integration?
• How has data and information management evolved with the advent of social technologies?

We have a very limited amount of sponsorship/speaking opportunities available. BDI also produces customized webinars for sponsors who want to engage communications and marketing leaders. For more information please contact Steve Etzler at[email protected] or 212-765-8045. Follow us on twitter at www.twitter.com/bdionline. 

Keynote Case Study:
 

Michael Mendenhall, Chief Marketing Officer, HP

Case Study Presenters:

Case Study: Harnessing the Power of 20 Million Customers
Presented by: Scott Gulbransen, Senior Manager, Corporate Communications, Intuit Inc. 
How TurboTax uses social media in advertising, marketing and public relations to increase engagement and increase sales.

Case Study: Social Media makes the grade at Harvard Business School 
Presented by: Brian Kenny, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, Harvard Business School 
Brian will explain how the world's best known business school with a century of academic tradition is a first-mover in terms of embracing social media to build new channels of communication with students, alumni, and others. With 70,000 active alumni and scores of others who purchase its publications, Harvard Business School is a best-in-class brand for MBAs, executive education and publishing. See how the School has integrated social media into its overall marketing and communications program to promote faculty work, create and engage with virtual communities, and generate buzz about students and alumni. Brian will talk about concerns of relinquishing brand control in the digital realm and the challenges of aligning social media efforts in a decentralized environment.

Case Studies will also be presented by:
Michael DiLorenzo, Director of Social Media Marketing and Strategy, National Hockey League
Joshua Karpf, Senior Manager, Digital Media Communications, PepsiCo
Lynn Mann, Director of External Communications, Michelin North America
Richard Pesce, Corporate Communications, Sprint Nextel

Roundtable Moderators:
David Berkowitz, Director of Emerging Media and Client Strategy, 360i
Robin Fray Carey, CEO and Co-Founder, Social Media Today LLC
Jarvis Cromwell, Managing Principal, Reputation Garage
Maura Curtin, Executive Director, Social Media Advertising Consortium
Michael DiLorenzo, Director of Social Media Marketing and Strategy, National Hockey League
Scott Gulbransen, Senior Manager, Corporate Communications, Intuit Inc.
Joshua Karpf, Senior Manager, Digital Media Communications, PepsiCo 
Brian Kenny, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, Harvard Business School 
Lynn Mann, Director of External Communications, Michelin North America
Michael Mendenhall, Chief Marketing Officer, HP
Richard Pesce, Corporate Communications, Sprint Nextel
Alex Romanovich, Founder, Chief Marketing Officer, Social2B
Kristen Ruby, President and Founder, Ruby Media Group LLC
Nancy Shenker, Founder and CEO, theONswitch
Bill Sobel, Chief Connections Officer, SobelMedia LLC

Sponsors:
PR Newswire / MultiVu; HP;  LatinVision; MarketersStudio.com; Mashable; New York University; Reputation Garage; Ruby Media Group LLC; SobelMedia LLC; Social2B; Social Media Advertising Consortium; Social Media Today LLC ; theONswitch

For more information, including registration, please click here to visit the event website. Use promo code MSS before December 16th for a discounted rate of $155.

Kosher Ham's Jewdar Tell-All

Originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

 

It's one of the most critical, controversial issues of our time. It's been the subject of more columns than MySpace. Even the Talmud, the great repository of Jewish debate and wisdom, is at a loss to comment on it. Yes, in what's undoubtedly the greatest miracle since the time the Maccabees kept their temple menorah burning with a small jar of oil, the gift of Jewdar continues to shed light on how marketers are targeting their ads.

I've wanted to return to this for months, ever since Jeremy Bloom reached out to me in August about his business KosherHam.com, a humorous T-shirt site that claims, "Wearing anything else just isn't kosher." He even noted that my new BFF Perez Hilton has been spotted in his gear.

I was intrigued when Bloom said that he's been honing his Jewdar - in this context, the act of targeting Jews through advertising, specifically on Facebook - and that he'd be willing to share all his secrets with me. He wrote, "I am constantly behaviorally targeting different demos, but the most receptive audiences with some of the highest click-through rates and lowest CPMs seem to be Jews." He tests religiously, trying different subject lines, ad copy, targeting, and models and T-shirts in the photos.

He's able to reach Jews largely through the keywords field in Facebook's self-service ads that target users based on their interests. Facebook won't target users by religion specifically, but if they list "Jewish" or Jews" as interests, they're fair game. Bloom further targets users in major cities with large Jewish populations. This will inherently mean some non-Jews see the ads -- but hey, they're welcome to buy shirts too.

So what keywords does Bloom use to find Jews? The eclectic roster includes: Jew, Jewish, Hebrew, Israel, Hillel, Sigma Alpha Mu, Zeta Beta Tau, Annie Hall, Brooklyn, bagels, deli, Chinese food, Matisyahu, Phish, jam bands, being Jewish, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen, Seinfeld, Hebrew Hammer, Heeb Magazine, and Fiddler on the Roof. If you don't know what some of these mean or what they have to do with Judaism, you're probably out of the target demographic.

After perusing the list, I wondered how some of these would do head to head. Bloom indulged me and ran some trials in four different brackets: City, Comedian, Cuisine, and Music. Bids were set at 34 cents CPM. The top performing ads were those with the highest click-through rate (CTR) and lowest cost-per-click (CPC). And the winners are...

Bracket 1

City: New York vs. Los Angeles

Subject Lines: NY Jews Love Kosherham, LA Jews Love Kosherham

Winner: LA gets the Oscar, with 18% CTR and 16 cents CPC, coasting past NY's 12% CTR and 23 cents CPC.

Bracket 2

Comedian: Seinfeld vs. Woody Allen

Subject Lines: Seinfeld Fans Love Us, Woody Allen Fans Love Us

Winner: Woody Allen kvetches up the clicks, with 33% CTR and 8 cents CPC, while Seinfeld's 13% CTR and 21 cents CPC showed signs of shrinkage.

Bracket 3

Cuisine: Bagels vs. Deli

Subject Lines: Shirts for Bagel Fanatics, Shirts for Deli Fanatics

Winner: Bagels win by a shmear, with 13% CTR and 19 cents CPC, overstuffing Deli's tournament-worst 6% CTR and 44 cents CPC.

Bracket 4

Music: Phish vs. Matisyahu

Subject Lines: Shirts for Phish Fans, Shirts for Matisyahu Fans

Winner: Phish hoists up its tournament-best 55% and 5 cent CPC, out-jamming Matisyahu's 27% CTR and 10 cent CPC.

I asked Bloom if he could explain why Phish has so much mazel in hooking Phacebook -- er, Facebook -- users. He cited a number of reasons: the right age demographic, the loyal Phish fan base of liberal Jews, and the shared interests in certain botanical exploits reflected in Kosher Ham's apparel.

More importantly, I asked about conversion rates. It's great to get a lot of clicks, but do Jews on Facebook convert? (It's just getting too easy, sorry.) He says he was able to track a couple sales from the Phish ads directly, and he also notices spikes when running ads from people who go directly to KosherHam.com or search for it. With search, Google has performed especially well, as has AIM Search -- Boom thinks people find shirts they like and share them via instant message.

So it turns out Jewdar is a little easier to understand than the Zohar, Maimonedes' "Guide to the Perplexed," and my fourth-grade Hebrew teacher's accent. And it's not foolproof, as there are probably a few Woody Allen fans in New York who didn't go to a Jewish sleepaway camp. But if a guy can start a site called KosherHam and sell T-shirts about getting the munchies for unleavened bread to Jewish Phish fans on Facebook, I've got to think he's on to something.

Retweetable Ads: The Dream That Never Dies

Originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

 

It sounds so perfect: you put a "share this" button in a banner ad and suddenly even stodgy, old display media becomes social media. Pay for the impressions and get the viral effect as a bonus. It's the future of advertising!

There are just two catches to this: it's been done before, and it's not the future of anything. It's a bell, a whistle, or maybe a bell and a whistle if executed well. But it's not going to fundamentally change advertising, social media, or anything else.

The latest entry in the space is TweetMeme's Adtweets, announced in late November (and illustrated above). TweetMeme, which has become the go-to Twitter aggregator and the most prominent source of "retweet this" buttons around the Web, is allowing advertisers to add a retweet button to standard ad units. You can't blame TweetMeme for overselling it: "The Adtweets are a way of putting pressure on advertisers to improve the standard of adverts..."

 While it sounds rather charming with the British accent, it's not going to improve ad quality. Instead, it might put more pressure on advertisers to attempt to create humorous or captivating ads that may do nothing to help their brand. Evian's "Rollerbabies" ad just earned a Guinness World Record by becoming the most viewed online ad ever, with over 45 million views, yet I have yet to see any coverage of the record that mentions Evian's market share or any other success metric from the brand's perspective. Maybe a needle moved, maybe nothing happened, but it's hardly a clear-cut case that a viral ad means it's successful.

The concept of sharing ads through social media isn't new. Google Gadget Ads launched in September 2007, and I don't know if I've ever seen one in the thousands of hours I've spent online since then. Clearspring and Gigya have also offered such functionality, and Spongecell makes it easy to "share with friends, or the world - without leaving the ad." I love that this functionality exists, but most of the time it's not necessary.

Here are four reasons why this isn't a game-changer:

1) Most ads aren't worth sharing. There are always exceptions to this rule -- the DVR-proof ads on TV you'll look for on YouTube and the newspaper and magazine ads you'll rip out and save. The same applies to banner ads, but that's relatively rare.

2) Sharing often isn't the best call to action. Are you trying to get a consumer to buy something? Request more information? Go to a store? Watch a TV show or movie on a certain date? Learn more about a new product? Get exposed to a new brand name? Think more positively about a brand? In any of these cases, sharing competes with the primary call to action. And if the primary call to action is to share the ad, what's the purpose?

3) Network-specific ads work best within those networks. Consider Facebook's Engagement Ads and Digg Ads that can be voted up or down. Each of those advertising experiences is customized to the publisher. Yet a Facebook ad wouldn't work the same way on the homepage of Forbes.com, and visitors to WebMD would generally be thrown off by Digg buttons on ads running there. As for tweetable ads, targeting can help -- a tweetable ad on TweetMeme.com or TechCrunch will find a more receptive audience than if it ran on a mainstream publisher. But such ads will still need to clearly illustrate why such sharable functionality makes sense in that context. I'm skeptically inclined to think advertisers will slap a "tweet this" or "share this" button on less discriminately, and then call it a social media campaign.

4) Most marketers and agencies don't plan earned and paid media together. That makes the value proposition a harder sell. Consider a marketer running display ads to drive traffic to its site, and (generously) 1%  of consumers click the ad. Say that marketer adds sharing functionality, the click-through rate (CTR) drops to 0.8%, but another 0.7% of consumers share the ad with their friends. In the latter scenario, that can be lumped together as a 1.5% engagement rate, but instead the marketer will be held accountable for the 20% drop in CTR from 1% to 0.8%. If you're still with me, let's take it one step further. The shared version of that ad (shared 0.7% of the time) would need a 29% CTR to generate enough clicks for those marketing strategists to keep their jobs. Then they have two choices in this admittedly oversimplified scenario: they have to demonstrate the value of the ad's pass-along rate, or they have to go back to generating clicks as efficiently as they can.

I still love the idea of sharable ads. It will become more common, and I'm sure a lot of marketers and agencies will use it in ways that achieve their goals. But it isn't going to make advertising better, any more than YouTube has made TV advertising better. It's just one more option marketers have online, where some pioneers will get great PR for it, some followers will ride the hype coattails, and most others will consider it -- if and when sharable ads make sense for them.