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Although Facebook is the thing of the moment, many forget about how big Myspace was/IS still. Though as a small business Myspace marketing can be very secondary to your online marketing efforts, it is still considered a great tool for the big brands to communicate to its audience, or connect with the young consumer base.

The campaign engages users by posing the question, "how far would you go for love?" Of course, this question is very interesting to almost anyone at any age and connects users. Also, it has interviews by artist, etc.

Take Cartier for example. A very large, classic brand of luxury watches has launched a Myspace site to promote their new line called, "Love by Cartier".

"Blogs, group or individual websites are no longer the signs of a new era, but are an established reality for a whole new generation," said Director of Communication Corinne Delattre of Cartier International.

"As a large brand we must be able to communicate to this new generation of adepts of the digital world. The MySpace community makes that possible."

If you're thinking about which social site you may want to focus your marketing efforts on, read the post I wrote, "Facebook vs. Myspace Users (A Demographic Report)"

If there is one big media company that really does keep up with the hot trends of online marketing, understands the power of it, and knows how to engage with users online it is the New York Times.

As you may remember, the NYT went to be a free online publication as they became a lot more involved with social media with sites such as Digg driving an insane amount of traffic and good SERP ranking making all that extra traffic generate more ad dollars.

As the web continues to evolve and gets more “social”, the NYT has come out with that is TimesPeople, ” users can build up friends lists and can see a "news feed" of which stories their friends are recommending, sharing, and commenting on. Times online readers have been able to comment on stories, as well as rate reviewed restaurants and movies, for some time now, but recommending is new.” You can see a video of TimesPeople Engineers and a bit more on it here.

This is a plugin only available for the Firefox browser, but will be made available soon for all browsers. It’s a great idea and many more news sites will VERY SOON follow.

So, after ALL the buzz and actually, this is a site where the buzz about it keeps increasing, I decided to join Twitter. Many online marketers are on Twitter, well, I think now people actually like it but many have joined it to see how they could "game it" and see how it could work towards our benefit or the benefit of clients.

I see why it could work towards generating traffic and buzz now. People can know what you're doing and can actually see your interactions with others. It seems like a great tool for big companies to keep close interaction with their followers, or even better yet, seems like a VERY powerful tool for bloggers.

Barak Obama has a Twitter account, what a smart move.

Hit me up on Twitter HERE or leave me a comment with your twitter address. If I can figure something cool on it (game it =) somehow) I'll let you know.

Finally, Zuckerberg made public the financial details of the social media giant Facebook which many have been awaiting on the speculation of the company going public and the big money Microsoft paid for a share of the company.

These numbers were recorded by Kara Swisher of All Things Digital. These figures were reported on an open call to employees.

Some highlights as reported by allthingsd.com:

“Revenue for Facebook for 2007 will be $150 million, as has been widely reported. But for 2008, Zuckerberg projected revenue to be increased to $300 million to $350 million.

More interesting was the news that Facebook would spend $200 million next year on capital expenditures, which is a whole lot of servers.

By the way, more expenses, noted chatty Mark, those employee levels would rise to more than 1,000 in 2008 from 450 now.”

Doesn’t seem too much in revenue for the giant that Facebook is and may have been a bit overvalued by Microsoft when buying a share of the company. Facebook has launched Facebook ads in Q4 of 2007 and should see a higher revenue in Q1 of 2008, let’s remember, Facebook hasn’t really focused too much on capitalizing on the site. Plus, if you count the monetization by app developers, it could well overexceed that $150 million figure.

OK, so ever since I got a Myspace profile I tried everything possible to get adsense code in there with my publisher ID so I can make money of the clicks…unfortunately that never happened.

I always thought advertisements on the profiles should be shared with the user, after all, we put all the time and effort in getting our own traffic, designing our site, etc.

Ads-Click, a company from Switzerland which has some presence in the U.S., has developed a Facebook application for users that allows users to put a code and deliver targeted ads to their users sharing 80% of the revenue (80% goes to you.) So, depending on your content from your profile and that of your visitor, it will display a relevant ad by text I believe, once they click, you get 80% of that click and 20% goes to them.

{If Facebook and Myspace offered this to their users with Adsense or any other contextual ad programs, there would be more of an incentive for profile users to drive traffic, refer friends, etc. I guess it comes down to SPAM and how the public will react}

It is called MicroSocialAds and should be out soon. How will Facebook react to this if they do? Facebook not getting a cut of advertising done through their site?

Good content = visitors. Visitors = advertising. Advertising = money. Great content = a lot of visitors. A lot of visitors = Big advertising.

“Paramount Pictures, MTV and Blockbuster have partnered to distribute the latest feature length film from the daredevil reality franchise in an ad-supported environment,” reports ClickZ.

ClickZ also reports, “From December 19th through the 31st, the film will be distributed by movie rental firm Blockbuster's Movielink service as a streaming video over Microsoft's Silverlight media player. The movie won't be directly available from Blockbuster, but instead will be distributed by the movie's own site at blockbuster.jackassworld.com. As co-sponsor, Blockbuster will manage advertising for initial distribution of the film.
Blockbuster will also sell pre- and post-roll video advertising, and has signed on Clearspring to manage its inventory. Additionally, interactive marketing firm Deep Focus will support the release, according to CEO Ian Schafer.”

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