Advertising


 * Advertising 2.0**
 * Social Media has taken advertising to new levels. Instead of advertising in the newspaper, mailers, or cable; in many cases it has become much more powerful to use the internet to advertise.
 * Every time you log into facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, or any other social network, there are ads; whether its an Ad on the top of your screen, a pop up, or its own page; they're there.
 * Marketers take advantage of the users demographic that are on these social networking sites and target their advertisements toward the appropriate groups. For example, on tv, you might see a toy commercial on channels like Neckelodeon or Disney where the majority of viewers is children. The same goes for the internet. If a college student is on facebook and they have joined a group about clothes, they might see more clothing ads, or if they are a fan of a golfer, they might see more golf ads.
 * If a consumer were to see a good review of a company or brand from a fellow twitter-er, they would be much more likely to test that brand out for themselves than they would if they saw a regular ad for it; the same can go for a bad review.
 * Wikis and blogs are a great marketing tool as well. Customer reviews let other customers know what to buy, or what not to buy.
 * Widgets and applications can be downloaded for free by comsumers which gets the company even closer to their customers, allowing them to track what they think, what their friends think, and how to better accomodate them.
 * "eMarketer predicts that $2 Billion will be spent this year (2008) on social network advertising worldwide and that this market will continue to grow - reaching $3.8 billion in spending by 2011."[| http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network_advertising]


 * Three major classifications of Social Network Advertising:**
 * 1) Direct Advertising based on your network of friends. Can be very effective but also controversial. An example is the **Facebook beacon project**. If a friend of yours does something, it may pop up in your new feed; saying that you purchased a certain movie, or became a fan of a certain celebrity. This can be very effective because it may prompt you to buy the movie, or become a fan yourself. At the same time it can be controversial because it "can be considered exploiting the personal relationships you have with your friends and also raises privacy concerns."
 * 2) Direct Advertising placed on your social networking site, which is more traditional. It appears to be a normal ad either on the top of the page, or somewhere on the side. These advertisements take advantage of the demographic of the site, and the ads are targeted directly to specific users.
 * 3) Indirect Advertising by creating 'groups' or 'pages'. This technique allows a company to create a 'page' or 'group' that users can choose to join. They will use this to build up 'subscribers' or 'fans' and use this to market a contest, a new product, or simply just to increase brand awareness. These groups can quickly grow in numbers of subscribers which can become a very effective marketing tool.

This is a typical facebook page and the advertising that accompanies it.
 * TGI Friday's used this type of advertising recently. Woody appeared in a commercial saying that if 1 million people joined his facebook group he would give out a free burger or chicken sandwich to everyone in the group. I personally joined, and I did recieve my free burger.
 * Here Cosmopolitan magazine has their own facebook page which lets users see information about the magazine and its affiliates [|http://www.facebook.com/#!/Cosmopolitan?v=wall&ref=ts.][[image:http://www.topclickmedia.co.uk/images/social-networking-advert.jpg caption="http://www.topclickmedia.co.uk/images/social-networking-advert.jpg"]]