Came in after lunch and Allan Stern, Gorden Peters, Mike Miller and Scott Rafer are speaking about Social Ad Network Solutions.

This an interactive panel.

Movement to use of more engaging applications, which makes sense, as the more engaging creative is needed for social media.

This may be meaningful for companies such as the online job search engines like Monster, CareerBuilder and HotJobs where it makes sense to advertise in Social Networks only to the extent you can make applications (say, in FaceBook) engaging and interactive.

CPM’s, presently at ~ 1.00 USD, are in visioned to increase to ~ 10.00 USD within the next year.

Metrics to be aware of:
Page segmentation data; silo ing of Social Networks is a going away. For people whobwant to piggy back on FaceBook Connect, now is the time as FaceBook will end up doing the same thing with OpenConnect as they did with applications a year ago.

Idea: there needs to be a standard for a “Social Media Endorsement”; not doing so leads into more trditional metrics that play into Google’s hand.

2010 seems to be the agreed on time when the value of social media, in a way that can be qualified, will emerge.

The space is less than a year old, it’s really just starting, perhaps equivalent to 2004 for search and online advertising.

CtR is not the metric we think should be focused on. In 2010 we’ll move to a space where we’ll be able to qualify and monitize social media.

Metrics we can look at today is do they come from a social media site and then search for one of the relevent keywords for the brand.

Brand affinity would be great if metrics could track it; the money will open up once this happens.

It is also true there I’d so much unsold inventory on Social Networks, and the only way to get larger spends is 3rd Party Reporting.

Today, impressions are like air and inventory is really, really cheap, but in two years it will not be the case.

Demographic targeting is present, today, but can’t fully be used, yet. Interactions need to be classified and ranked and that is more important that demographic data.

By the way – here’s a more detailed writeup of the same session from Inside the Marketers Studio by David Berkowitz, who takes pretty detailed notes, I’ve found – Social Network Ad Solutions