TOP 10 TECH

Last week I had the opportunity to take part in a second round of beta trials with a new advertising platform or product line offered through SocialSpark.  At a high level it is a direct placement of a hyperlink that when clicked results in a charge to the advertiser, or cost per click (CPC).

The first round of alpha testing involved testing both naked and banner links under a CPC model on blogs and other websites.  I didn’t take part in that first test, but a week later after a few upgrades and modifications were included, I took the system for a spin as a publisher (not an advertiser, but I’m interested in trying that next.) 

I engaged in a very small test of the service deploying the links provided for twitter and facebook.  I included a single link in my Facebook stream where I have close to 300 friends that I know or have known very well.

I don’t just partake in Facebook to blindly add people I do not know.  And the links provided were unique for twitter on the one hand and Facebook on the other, such that the SocialSpark system could track the number of clicks sourced from the unique destinations.

 

 

Now, in this case the advertiser was Ted Murphy, the CEO of Izea, which owns SocialSpark.  The destination landing page of the campaign was Ted’s own Twitter home page.
Now, the link initially presented me with a question.  Where does it go, and can I click it to find out? Its hard to work an ad in somewhere in an appropriate & effective manner if you do not know what the purpose is or even what the landing page looks like. When I last looked at this opportunity and system, these questions seemed to be an open question.
So I clicked it and learned quickly where it went. It was Ted’s Twitter landing page.  You could tell, because it had his name and face with his stamp licking tongue sticking out.  The guy must be an absolute fanatic about stamps and the postal service because his tongue is sticking out in almost every picture.

So there you have it, this is one of those technologies or tools that has the potential to be very disruptive and from an advertising perspective very effective.  Regardless, it is going to take a good bit of experimentation both by advertisers as well as by social network users to learn how to deploy this effectively to get results yet in a way that does not disrupt the balance of their conversation with their friends and followers.

While the effectiveness is probably more important from an advertisers perspective, I suspect the debate over how and when to include it and what if any backlash there might be from followers will actually be the loudest and most vocal part of the discussion.

Personally, I feel that social network users that currently brand themselves as if they were some form of public radio in an environment breeding internet famous people every other week, providing a free service (the joy of their friendship and company) will not find a good way to use this technology without feeling a backlash.  However, the majority of social network users just go to social networks as ‘themselves’ and do not try to become an ‘internet personality’. 

These users(normal people not seeking Internet Fame) will find that this will likely be a very good method for earning more revenue to compensate their engagement in the cloud and possibly fund portions of their other online activities including research, debate, analysis, commentary, blogging, and philosophy.

Measuring the results of a SocialSpark CPC Campaign for Publishers

Heather helped me find this when I was testing on Friday.

1. Go to ‘account’
2. Click on ‘manage blogger account’,
3. Click on ‘taken opps’,
4. Click on ‘cpc’,
5. Click on ‘opp’ name,
6. scroll down – look at the number of clicks under Twitter and FB & other badges or links

 

SocialSpark Using ClickForensics to Mitigate Click Fraud

I mentioned that when I was presented with the links that I did not know where they went.  I clicked them trusting to Izea’s partner ClickForensics and their ability to discern that my click came from myself and not from a target of the ad campaign.  Hopefully they were able to screen out my click.

Background on SocialSparks Click Fraud Mitigation plan.

Updates in the System from SocialSpark since I Tested the CPC Opportunity

Since I tried this a blog article showed up on the Izea Blog talking about some of the updates/upgrades.  I believe most of these were already live when I tried the system, but wanted to include the details in case I happened to be working with this at some point half way through an update/correction/fix etc.

 

• Advertisers can now see the review status of posts on their Manage Campaigns page
• Two more filter fixes: (1) the ‘Open’ filter on the opps list now only shows opps that are approved and not paused and (2) filtering on the opps page has been fixed for Classic pricing opps
• Assets for CPA/CPC opps now open in a lightbox instead of a new window
• Facebook and Twitter codes have been added to CPC/CPA assets
• Major improvements to our Customer Love interface

This week in SocialSpark(t)

Disclosure with CPC Links in Blog Articles from SocialSpark

Now, in general when a blogger uses Google Adsense on their site, they are not required to provide disclosure.  When a blogger runs any type of affiliate link or banner on their website, they are not required to provide disclosure.  This stems from over a decade of banner advertising and text link advertising on the internet.

When a blogger includes a SocialSpark text link or banner link that is of the CPC type of opportunity, disclosure is required IF the link or banner is placed within a blogger’s article.  SocialSpark provides disclosure badges for this purpose with the opportunity.

If a blogger provides the CPC link or banner elsewhere on the site, say in the header or on the sidebar, then they are not required to provide disclosure.

As I mentioned, the industry standard is to provide no disclosure.  SocialSpark seems to be going one step beyond the industry in terms of transparency.  They do this on the article where the bloggers name is more likely to be associated with any given advertisement but not on the site where it may not.

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