Blab named as one of only 25 partners for Facebook’s marketing api

November 19, 2011

John Kottcamp Facebook Advertising, social media , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Blab is inventing a whole new way to advertise in the social space. Traditional advertising invades the social space with product claims and brand slogans. It’s not surprising that people click on ads in the social space half as often as they do on websites.

Blab flips the traditional ad format on its head and leads with what people are talking about. Blab predicts trending conversations by target audience across Twitter, Facebook, blogs and forums; auto generates and targets relevant ads before the trend peaks.

Blab is launching an automated ad creation and targeting platform to level the playing field for small medium businesses – giving them a cost-efficient way to run effective advertising on Facebook. Blab delivers 3X leads with custom-built contextual advertising and media placement requiring zero time investment from the small medium business.

Blab announced today that it has become a part of the Facebook Marketing API Program. Access to the Ads API is a significant pivot point as it allows Blab to further drive the power of relevancy as Facebook innovates advertising solutions.

“We have seen a dramatic shift in the power of data moving from key word search to natural language intelligence allowing us to unearth what the influencers in a category are talking about,” says Randy Browning, Cofounder and CEO, Blab. “Now it’s all about predicting tomorrow’s conversation and tailoring advertising in real-time to drive a whole new level of engagement.”

Browning says that Blab’s key difference is to think in passion categories and influencers. “Our hardest job was to build a self-learning engine that evolves the knowledge base on an hourly basis while being driven from the category perspective and not ours or our client’s.”

“If you haven’t thought of using Facebook as a customer acquisition channel, Blab makes it easier for you to start and will drive more leads than you’re currently getting in any other channel” says Malcolm MacGregor, Cofounder and CCO, Blab. “Blab’s relevancy ad solution helps businesses across the entire ad spectrum, from driving qualified awareness at a CPM of tens of cents to converting engagement at a rate of 20-40 percent.”

“Blab is just getting started”, MacGregor says, “we are currently working with 20 beta clients ranging from CPG companies like Johnsonville to car dealerships like Park Place Motors to sports companies like Lib Tech and GNU snowboards.”

Check Blab out at www.blabbings.com

How Real is Real-time? The answer has little to do with data

August 9, 2011

John Kottcamp CMO, integrated marketing, Marketing Strategy, social networking, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Srividya Sridharan of Forrester Research, posted the question of “How real is real-time” on the customer intelligence community. I’d like to share my reply to her.

There are multiple areas of marketing in which real-time has a unique definition, it’s own importance and a set of tools, practitioners and process that enable it.

From a transactional point of view, real-time means being able to transact from start to finish with no latency. In ecommerce, this is a given, although it surprises me how many websites still ask the customer to submit a form, or call a rep. to get a quote, complete a transaction or get customer service. The Holy Grail of this type of real-time marketing is the complete integration of multiple channels including online, social and in-store. While some, mostly B2C, retailers have done a good job combining online shopping, order and payment with in-store availability and pick-up, this cross-channel experience has rarely been duplicated in the B2B world where sales are still driven by direct sales forces and represent long and complicated purchase cycles. for example, it’s still virtually impossible for a company’s procurement department to negotiate, transact and fufill an enterprise software licensing agreement online.

From the data perspective, real-time refers to the ability to collect and process data in real-time. Whether transactional or behavioral, it is usually focused on the online advertising, search, web or email experience and increasingly user generated activity on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. There appears to be the most momentum in capturing and analyzing social data, which is created, distributed and reacted to in real-time, however most marketers, agencies and analytics providers are still trying to apply the same methodologies to social as they have used in the past to understand traditional channels like broadcast and print. Needless to say, the importance of frequency and reach is completely different when applied to multi-facted social relationships. it is is this area of campaign management and analytics that appear to be paying the most attention to trying to achieve real-time. It won’t be difficult to generate mountains of data, but the trick is having the resources to understand the data and most importantly use that data in real-time. There appears to be very little progress in brands ability to act in real-time.

And finally, the most important area of real-time, is the one most overllooked; understanding the customer in real-time. We spend a lot of time, technology and resources to understand what consumers did in the past and hope that will help us predict what they are going to do in the future. But we devote very little energy to finding out what’s important to a consumer in the moment and then being able to communicate with them in a manner that is relevant to them in that same moment. This is the real real-time Holy Grail and in an increasingly ADHD afflcited world, this is the key to cutting through the noise and engaging customers on their terms. This is why I’ve started my new company Blab. We’re all about relevancy and relevancy is both listening as well as creating and distirbuting branded content. Check our our website for more details about our approach, www.blabbings.com.

Facebook Advertising is catching on with local business

June 14, 2011

John Kottcamp real-time marketing , , , , , , , Leave a comment

22% of local merchants in the U.S. have used Facebook Ads according to a report by MerchantCircle. And in a recent report from eMarketer, 60% of Facebook’s ad revenue is coming from small business.

This is impressive and surely should be seen as major trend, both for small business and for Facebook. However with Facebook ad click through rates nearly 50% lower than industry average, it begs the question of whether small businesses are getting a good return on their investment.

There was a lot of talk a couple of months ago when Facebook announced it was testing real-time marketing. In their case, the idea was to present ads according what people were posting about. It’s a great idea, but it doesn’t address the need to contextualize the ads themselves. And this is the real problem for small businesses. Larger advertisers like Fortune 500 companies hire agencies to help them write the best headline and design the most visually engaging ads. Small businesses don’t have these resources and can’t afford them in any case.

However even large agencies do not have the ability to deliver Facebook ads that are contextual and certainly not deliver them in real-time. The future of Facebook advertising depends on solving these problems. Oh, and by the way, we at Blab think we have the solution.

Popularity and Influence are not the same

March 1, 2011

John Kottcamp Marketing Strategy, real-time marketing, social media, social networking, User-generated content , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I read a thought provoking article in AdAge this morning by Matthew Creamer. The title, “Your Followers are no measure of your influence,” does an excellent job of debunking the notion that just because you have millions of followers on Twitter, you are automatically an influencer. But I think that Matthew missed the larger point that there are genuine influencers in every community whether online or not. And that there are different categories of influencers representing three kinds of publishers; editorial, brand and peers.

The Justin Biebers or Ashton Kutchers of the world are not significantly different than the Hollywood hucksters of generations past. For anyone who can remember Orson Wells pitching Paul Masson wines, there is plenty of evidence of celebrities trying to convert their popularity into influence. They leverage their own personal brands to add a cache to what they are promoting; branding 101. These people are professional or editorial influencers and to which also belong most politicians, journalists and analysts. Regardless of your aesthetic, political or social beliefs, it’s hard not to acknowledge this class of bloggers, Tweeters and authors. And it’s hard not to understand that no matter where they come from, they are advancing their own or their sponsor’s agendas.

There’s another class of influencers who are exerting their presence of the Web and across social media; brands themselves. Within every category, there are competing brands that are generating content aimed to influence the conversation about and the perception of their brand and the products and services associated with their brand. And like the editorial influencers, they unabashedly have their own agendas.

So what does that leave? The rest of the social world made up of individuals who demonstrate their influence by their expertise, their ability to communicate and the authenticity of their messages. These are our peers, like the best Mommy bloggers, leaders in various forums; what Augie Ray of Forrester Research calls, Mass Influencers. This group which amounts to around 6% of the online population generates 80% of the influence impressions.

All these different categories of influencers can be leveraged by marketers, both to disseminate their content, buoyed by the influencers own credibility, but also as a means of understanding what consumers are genuinely interested in.

At Blab, www.blabbings.com, we understand that if you don’t first understand who the “influencers” really are and what is the nature of their influence, you won’t be able to use them to give a lift to your marketing efforts, regardless of channel.

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