I was at a SEMPO meetup last night on the topic of Search Meets Social Advertising at Yahoo! Times Square location.  Speakers included Don Steele, VP, Digital Marketing at MTV, Brett Wein, Sales Director at Facebook and Dale Durrett, Director, Eastern Region Marketing Solutions at LinkedIn

My sense of the conversation about Facebook and LinkedIn was Social Advertising is superior to Search Advertising in it’s ability to target individuals within the social network (due to the information processing in  social networks is much richer than Search Engine query processing).

On the other hand Social Advertising should not be directly compared with paid search advertising because the click through rate will be much lower (and cheaper).  However other actions such as white paper downloads do translate well in Social Advertising.

MTV/Comedy Central brought up something that I took issue with but is so commonplace that everyone in the room was surprised.  Comedy Central has inside knowledge of when some programs on it’s roster come up and if they can anticipate a sharp demand in the audience searching for terms associated with a show or guest, etc.   I compared that to “insider trading”.     That got a weird response but in a way, don’t they jail people for doing the same exact thing in financial markets?