Photo by tantek on Flickr

Since I have become addicted to Foursquare, the location check-in service, I set out to find the best tips to get to the top of Foursquare’s leaderboard while playing fair.

Here are the top 5 tips I discovered:

1If you want to become mayor, check in to places that you know that you’ll be able to check in to frequently, as many times as possible. Didn’t find your place on Foursquare already? Add it. Don’t forget and don’t neglect — someone else may steal your mayorship from you.

2Foursquare resets its leaderboard on Sunday nights. To maximize your weekly tallies, make sure you start early in the week.

3Check in to new places — every time you do so, these grant you 5 extra points, and these can add up quickly.

4Get familiar with how to unlock your special badges and work on unlocking them. Here are two great badges lists: TonyFelice.WordPress.com and TheKruser.com.

5Don’t cheat. For the sake of the community, don’t check in to places if you’re not really there. This only hurts the whole user experience on Foursquare.

Hey, Foursquare, here’s an idea for you

One feature I feel is missing in Foursquare: Once I check in to a place, I want the app to scan all my contacts and tell me the 5–10 users who are closest to my proximity at any given time. This will enable users to maximize the potential of meeting people in their network more frequently and make for a more cohesive user base.

And finally, here’s a good, short Foursquare tutorial for you:

How To Unlock Your World With Foursquare on Howcast

Related

• Foursquare Focuses on Privacy on Eve of Expected Facebook Location Launch (Mashable)

Image from Bite Daily.

 
How do you measure the ROI of social media? This is a question that we are often asked by companies that want to enter the social media realm but are afraid or unsure of how to prove its success to their superiors. Want to show your bosses that social media works? Below is a great video from Erik Qualman (@equalman) at Socialnomics that showcases several social media ROI success stories.

Here are the top 10 facts you should remember from this video:

1) Gary Vaynerchuk grew his family business from $4 million to $50 million using social media.

2) Wetpaint/Altimeter found companies that widely engage in social media surpass their peers in both revenue and profit. (See Ranking the Top 100 Global Brands — PDF.)

3) Lenovo has experienced a 20% reduction in activity to their call center since they launched their community website for customers.

4) Burger King invested  less than $50,000 in their Whopper Sacrifice Facebook application and received an estimated return of over $400,000 in press/media value. They received 32 million impressions as a result of this campaign.

5) Blendtec quintupled sales with its “Will it Blend” series on YouTube.

6) Dell has already made $3 million in sales via twitter (I’ve heard this number has already increased to $6.5 million).

7) Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI.

8 ) 37% of generation Y heard about the Ford Fiesta via social media before its launch in the US. 25% of Ford’s marketing budget is spent on digital/social media. They are the only US auto company that didn’t take a government loan.

9) Naked Pizza set a one day sales record using social media: 68% of their sales came via Twitter and 85% of their new customers.

10) Software company Genius.com reports 24% of social media leads convert to sales opportunities.

Here’s the video:

As Alex Bogusky, Co-Chairman of CP&B says: “You can’t buy attention anymore. Having a huge budget doesn’t mean anything in social media…. The old media paradigm was “pay to play.” Now you get back what you authentically put in. You’ve got to be willing to “play to play.”

71% of companies plan to increase investments in social  media by an average of 40% because:

1) It’s low-cost marketing

2) Getting traction

3) We have to do it

If you don’t do it, you can be certain that your competitors will.

“Think of Twitter as the canary in the coal mine” — Morgan Johnston, JetBlue Airways

“Our head of social media is the customer” — McDonald’s

The time for social media is now.

Repubished from Blonde 2.0.

From easy-forex’s fantasy team campaign

We began working with easy-forex to combine their forex trading and social media activity back in February 2010. We knew right away that teaming easy-forex’s expertise, vibrancy, and fresh approach to FX with our knowledge of the nuts and bolts of social media would invariably produce a winning combination.

When we first took stock of easy-forex’s social media efforts, it was clear they had already recognized the value of social profiles and had already laid the groundwork for us on Twitter and YouTube. We knew too, though, that easy-forex’s full potential was only beginning to be actualized, and so we set out to create a home for their traders, a place where they could come and chat with one another regarding their trading habits, methods, tips and strategies — basically, anything and everything related to forex.

easy-forex has always made an effort to be on the cutting edge of trading innovation, and we made sure that bloggers were made aware of this fact by letting them know all about easy-forex’s great customer service and any releases of new products, all through our blogger outreach campaign. This consisted of an extensive search and mapping effort to find the most relevant and high-profile blogs read by the target market. We created a blogger kit detailing easy-forex’s most promising products/services and set our sights on the top 90 bloggers in the tech and forex industry. Our efforts paid off and we received coverage in such tier 1 blogs as VentureBeat, as well as GoMo News and Currency Trading. We were able to reach over 500,000 unique readers with easy-forex’s compelling story of how their unique approach was impacting online trading. Our story was also heavily retweeted and shared by others, furthering its overall social ROI.

Speaking of Twitter, we worked closely with easy-forex to procure real time actionable trading data, directly from their dealing room, to send out as tweets. This close relationship added industry relevant substance to our tweets which set us apart from the average FX tweeters and contributed to a spike in easy-forex’s Twitter following by 25% in just two months.

Leveraging Facebook and other channels

Taking off in all these various directions simultaneously, with each venue showing an exponential growth rate, we created an easy-forex Facebook page to act as a central hub for all our forex trading and social media efforts. We use the social network as a coalescing tool with which to announce and trackback any and all forex trading and social media collateral including blog posts, videos, tweets, news feeds, and discussions, keeping the page active and alive.

Our easy-forex FB page also served to replace the typical forex forum pages traditionally used as a place where traders can come to share their thoughts. By replacing the traditional forums with a Facebook style setting, the discussion is made more real and more personal. It also serves as a barrier preventing any anonymous person/competitor from writing whatever they like without taking responsibility for their words. On social networks, where one has their picture posted, their information written and is connected to friends and family, one feels a responsibility for their actions and words, and will think twice before posting something.

Since launching the easy-forex page at the tail end of February 2010, we managed to go from zilch to over 5,000 fans. An easy-forex YouTube channel features easy-forex’s Emma Andreou’s engaging and informative daily dose of FX happenings and has built a growing loyal audience. In three minutes these forex trading daily videos cover the top 10 market reports, saving hours of research for individual traders. A LinkedIn group was also opened with the same daily diligence for sparking group interaction and information sharing, within and among all easy-forex’s members.

We also built a blog for easy-forex where we publish forex related news and market views. Here too easy-forex became an active partner in helping us to build their brand by encouraging their own FX specialist to write and participate in the blog. Their keen insights and bold predictions have led to the blog becoming a weekly must read amongst the easy-forex community and beyond.

One of the main goals of our social media activities has been to create full transparency between easy-forex and traders via our discussions on all our social channels as well as the information we provide on our blog. This massive online presence within social networks as well as blogs, not to mention the sharing of our content by others, has had the added effect of helping easy-forex’s SEO efforts.

It’s important to note that across all our platforms, members are by no means passive assets. easy-forex’s campaigns are highly interactive with broad open channels being kept for our various online communities on a daily basis. After all, happy members are the best ambassadors your company could ever ask for, a fact whose full reach and value is beyond measurability.

Fantasy Team campaign’s payoff

Take our first easy-forex Facebook campaign, for example. The campaign was called easy-forex’s Fantasy Team. It began June 8, designed to coincide with and build off the internationally popular World Cup soccer games. The campaign content consisted of asking our Facebook members to create their own fantasy soccer team, using as random and as outrageous a selection of personalities that they could think of. Participants were encouraged to get even more creative by presenting their selection in the form of doctored photographs with superimposed heads, or upload video versions, or any wacky way that their imaginations could conjure up.

The results beat all expectations. During the three-week campaign, easy-forex’s FB member count increased by a staggering 2,600 people, approximately 50 submissions were entered, and easy-forex received over 800 lead applications requesting more information about their company. All in all, a super successful and highly interactive campaign combing forex trading and social media efforts.

We’ve only begun to scratch the surface of the great potential waiting to be uncovered in the realm of forex trading and social media. We are hard at work thinking up new creative ideas and campaigns that can help take us to the next level of our social media activity with easy-forex. Stay tuned for what comes next — we promise to keep things interesting.

I’ve been in the social media space now for quite a few years and I meet with at least 5 companies each week who have understood the importance of utilizing social media for their businesses but are still afraid of entering their brands into the new media age.

What are they worried about? Here are the top five concerns that I’ve heard from executives and my response to them:

1) They’re afraid they’ll lose control of their brand and open themselves up to negative feedback — When you open a business and start marketing your services and exposing your brand to others, people will start talking about your brand. And this is why you exposed them to your brand in the first place.

People are going to be talking about your brand no matter what. The question is: Do you want to be a part of the dialogue or do you want to just play ostrich and ignore what people are saying? If a person is dissatisfied with your services, do you prefer he opens up this discussion in a “I hate <your brand>” group opened up by another hater or do you prefer that he come to your page and post the complaint there allowing you to respond appropriately and even perhaps win him back as a client?

Social media didn’t create the dissatisfied customer — it only allowed him a platform to express his frustration. If you don’t give him the stage to speak, he will do it elsewhere and believe me, it will cause a great deal more damage to your brand if you’re not there to respond and open to criticism.

When we speak of social media, we speak of conversational marketing — listening before selling, opening a dialogue with the user and not just throwing a blinking banner in his face. Brands need to make that switch in their heads and understand that social media is SOCIAL. Many conversations will be positive and you will have these nice messages recorded for everyone to see publicly — your bosses, your investors, your customers and potential customers:

Some conversations may be negative but these conversations should be seen as welcomed opportunities to gain back customers. If you utilize social media effectively and are alert to what people are saying about you online, then you can also respond in a timely and intelligent manner. When you’re dazed and confused and too afraid to see what people may be saying about you, that’s when the conversation can get out of control and your branding and positioning can go out the window. Companies who understand social media know that by using social media they are increasing the number of positive responses to their brand and making sure to control and decrease the negative responses by showing people that they actually care about what they have to say.

2) They don’t understand it — Companies fear social media because they don’t understand what to do with it, what to talk about, who to turn to. They often time try to do it in-house without the appropriate guidance, fail miserably and then say that social media doesn’t work. Don’t hire your friend’s son who is very active on Facebook to do your marketing strategy for you. Just like you wouldn’t fix your car in-house or do your PR in-house, neither should you start doing social media on your own without having a social media guru at your side. And when I say guru, I mean someone who has had a good track record in creating successful social media campaigns for other companies in the past. Once you have such a guide at your side and you begin to understand what social media is all about, then you will not be afraid of it anymore and you will start to recognize the infinite number of amazing opportunities that social media will open your brand to.

3) The effectiveness of social media is hard to measure — Because social media is still in its diapers, it took a little while for tools tracking the ROI on social media campaigns to emerge, however today we have a suite of different tools that allow companies to track even the most minute details in the effectiveness of their social media campaigns. Tools like Google Analytics, which allow us to track the traffic coming into our site as well as where it’s coming from has existed for years. Google alerts which allow us to see the blog posts and other sites linking back to our site have also existed for a long time. And we are now seeing an influx of services that not only allow you to easily monitor what people are saying about your brand but also see who are the top influencers, opinion leaders in your industry and more. There are numerous services that allow you to see the top influencers on twitter such as: Twitter grader and twitter analytics services such as Twitalyzer . Facebook also provides its own insights to page admins and enables admins to view information regarding the demographics of their fans and also how many interactions, comments, wall posts, etc. were found on the page. The more we learn about social media, the more tools we get to measure it. Not only are our efforts in the social media realm measurable but social media campaigns also allow us to target specific campaigns to specific niches like no other media today.

4) They’re afraid that employees will be on Facebook and twitter chatting all day — Facebook today has around 350 million users. If Facebook was a nation, it would be the world’s third most populous after China and India. Your employees are there anyway. Why not utilize the fact that they are there to help your cause? When you need to spread the word on Facebook, why not enable your employees to help you or when you finally open that fan page on Facebook, why not allow your employees to become fans and encourage them to take part in your social media activities. Dell for example, who is well known for their great twitter strategy (a strategy which has earned them $6.5 million to date), has around 200 employees working its twitter account, responding to people.

In addition, not allowing your employees to have access to the vast amount of information that can be found on social networks as well as not enabling them to use these networks as research tools nor to network with people in the industry also puts your company at a great disadvantage to your competitors who do allow their employees (and even encourage them) to use social media tools.

5) Social media is costly — This last fear is not only something that companies should not fear but it is also not true. If you consider the millions of people that you can reach using social media as opposed to the cost of buying an ad on TV or buying a banner, you’ll see that social media is one of the most cost efficient ways of reaching your target audience today.

To anyone who still thinks social media is a fad, wake up. It’s not. Social media is here and it’s here to stay. If you took a look at the latest report that came out of Davos regarding social networks, you’ll see that Facebook is now the second most popular site on the internet after Google and that according to Nielsen since February 2009 people have been spending more time on social-networking sites than on e-mail, and the lead is getting bigger. The question for your brand is no longer whether to be there or not to be there. The question is when will you be there and the longer you keep your head in the ground, the more you’ll lose touch with what’s happening out there in the real world.

Great Ostrich pic credit: http://blog.karmona.com

How a social media campaign helped HP Israel’s PSG Group gain momentum

When Blonde 2.0 began to assist HP Israel’s Personal Systems Group with their social media marketing efforts, we found they had no representation in the social media world. A community had not yet been built for the group and their customer base did not have a proper network to turn to for questions and answers.

Let me tell you what we did. Over the course of a few months’ time, Blonde 2.0 and HP quickly exposed HP Israel’s PSG group to the social media world and began engaging with customers and potential customers to increase the group’s brand awareness in the community.

When you build a community from scratch, the target audience you primarily want to attract are community leaders, early adapters and other movers & shakers in your industry in order to gain some momentum. Blonde 2.0 launched HP Israel’s Facebook Fan Page in September and started from a zero fan base. Since close to a third of Israel’s population has a Facebook profile – 2.5 million Israelis and the demographic groups we wanted to target were found on Facebook — this social network was a great place to start building a community around HP. We also turned to Twitter to reach out to HP’s community, as no other network allows for real-time message updates nor engagement with Israeli industry leaders from the high-tech and digital marketing worlds as Twitter does.

By the end of first month, HP’s fan base on Facebook grew to 150 fans and we noticed an exponential growth each week. By the end of October, HP had 619 fans and by November we reached 810 fans. This quick growth was based on the interesting content we uploaded and our engagement with the fans on the page. We discussed computers, laptops and provided assistance with HP products. We also created all types of interesting activities and contests for the fans to take part in.

Providing incentives for fans and followers to take part in the community is a must when brands take a part in the social media world. A brand should be ready to compensate fans who promote its name both by social incentives as discussed in this post and also by giving fans prizes.

At the end of November, early December, we unleashed HP Israel’s first giveaway campaign, asking our fan base to participate in a creative contest that would offer them a chance to win a new HP Mini laptop (the Mini 110c). We wanted to emphasize the product’s easiness of mobility and asked our fans to tell us where they would take their laptop if they won it. We encouraged fans to be as creative as possible, giving them the option to upload videos, sound clips, photos and graphic materials to the fan wall as their contest submission. The response rate was overwhelming and we were amazed at how much fans invested in their creations in order to win. We received over 630 entries within 3 weeks’ time.

The winner of our competition was a creative song writer named Nadav Harel who wrote an enthusiastic song about HP: HP song: Cute Little Computer. Nadav received recognition and praise from the community (social incentive) and a new laptop. The HP laptop contest did wonders for our activity and growth of the HP Facebook Fan Page. Our community grew to over 2,580 fans.

Campaigns held on Twitter also encouraged HP fans to become more involved in our community. We asked our followers to tweet us a personal experience they had with an HP product. The creators of the three most creative tweets of personal experiences they had with HP products were awarded a Bluetooth mouse known as The Dragon. During the two weeks of our Twitter campaign, HP Israel’s twitter community grew by more than 140 followers. With Twitter, we continually monitor what people say about HP PSG’s products and provide assistance in real time. Below, a user complained that he had not received his computer from the service lab on time. HP Israel quickly intervened to fix the problem and everyone came out of this story happy.

It is always exciting to build a brand’s community from the ground up and watch our marketing efforts and activity grow within the social sphere. We’ve learned a few lessons along the way and continue to learn daily from our valued community members.

Tips on holding social media campaigns

A few tips for newcomers who haven’t yet led any social media campaigns:

1) Listen to what people have to say about your brand and be responsive to their needs. Don’t be defensive. Be attentive.

2) Always remember to be transparent and honest with the members of your community. Make sure that if you promise something, you make it happen. Don’t be afraid to admit when you’re wrong – people appreciate that from a brand.

3) When creating contests, make sure the rules are loud and clear. There’s nothing worse than bitter fans angry after a contest’s rules weren’t made clear in advance.

4) Remember that building a community takes time. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither is an online community. Enjoy each one of the phases you go through when building your community and learn from them.

We live in a wonderful age today where brands can interact and have an open communication channel with customers and potential customers. I am happy to share our experiences with the building of one such community. An online community just like an offline community needs to be nurtured with delicate care and fed with content, activity and live discussion at all times in order to keep it buzzing and this is what we aim to achieve above all.

ICQ7 introduces a way to manage social messaging across networks

If we look back in history , we will find that much before Facebook, MySpace and YouTube, there was ICQ. For anyone who doesn’t know, ICQ was created in 1996 and is now wholly owned by AOL. Back in the day, ICQ was the pioneer of social media and real time updates. It introduced us to instant messaging and a revolutionary new way to communicate with people instantly in real time.

ICQ could have been a sort of Facebook or Twitter a long time ago. It’s taken ICQ quite a long time to get back to its status as a social pioneer, but now with its new client software, ICQ is getting back to what it was about all the way from the beginning: a place to interact with your friends everywhere. “Everybody Everywhere” is, after all, ICQ’s slogan, and being an ICQ veteran myself, I am very excited to announce the launch of the new ICQ 7.

ICQ 7 is software that brings together all your social interactions from across the Web. Instead of having to open a few different pages and applications to get my friends’ status updates on Facebook, to read tweets of my favorite people and to follow what’s happening on other sites as well such as Youtube, Flickr, Digg and Delicious, ICQ 7 allows me to use one personal communication tool to integrate all my online social activities. I am able to syndicate my updates to all of my social networks with a single click and get status updates and tweets from all my friends in my networks in one single platform. (Disclosure: Blonde 2.0 is ICQ’s social media firm)

ICQ 7 enables real-time updates from content sharing sites and top social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Digg and Delicious and will soon announce the integration of local social networks. Alonside the ICQ Contact List, users can find a separate tab of real time feeds and updates from their friends from their various social networks. Users will no longer need to open up a new browser and log in to separate networks that they’re members of each time they want to comment on their friends’ updates. From now on, consider ICQ to be your social networks’ one-stop shop. No longer will you need to search for content on different platforms — the content finds you. ICQ 7’s interface is also improved with software that is fully compatible with all versions of Microsoft Windows, including Windows 7.

A few cool features to note in ICQ 7

My Status: Status updates I make on ICQ can be automatically posted in my other supported networks as well. I can also easily share pictures and links.

Feeds from friends: Updates made by your friends on leading social networks and content sharing sites appear in real time in the “Feeds from Friends” tab on the contact list. You can comment on these updates directly from your ICQ and the comment will appear also in the relevant social network/site. You can see updates from all your friends in your various social networks — not just from friends that have ICQ.

My Box: The “My Box” tab on the ICQ Contact List is the place where ICQ users get all notifications of their personal online activity – who commented on my status and in which site, who liked the photos I uploaded, etc.

New User Profile: ICQ 7 presents a more enhanced user profile — both within the client and on the website. The user profile is the place where users can display who they are by sharing pictures and personal updates on their page. The new user profile is now offered in color schemes that are fully customizable to suit the user’s mood. Additionally, the new user profile allows ICQ users to view their friends’ contact lists and add new people to their own contact list, thereby increasing their circle of friends.

Picture-Sharing Tool: A new, quick and fun application for sharing pictures with friends — see above.

Faster, lighter: ICQ 7 performance has been vastly improved with installation time reduced by nearly 50% and requested space for installation reduced approximately by 30%.

ICQ 7 offers a social messaging client that enables quick and easy communication friends from across networks, ability to view real-time updates from: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Digg and Delicious.

Israel-based ICQ’s managing director, Eliav Moshe, says: “ICQ 7 brings social messaging into play, integrating users’ online social world with their personal communication tool. The new version answers users’ needs for a quick and easy communication tool that also helps you be up to date with everything that’s going on in multiple social networks and content sharing sites. With a loyal community of over 42 million users worldwide, we are working on the upcoming integration of local social networks into ICQ 7 as well.”

It is only fitting that the company that was the pioneer of the Web 2.0 era has now integrated this Web 2.0 world into one manageable space. Try it out for yourself and let me know what you think. In my opinion, it offers the best solution we have today for one platform that integrates all our social interactions into one convenient platform.

Become an ICQ fan on Facebook

Check out their Twitter

Additional images

• ICQ notifications
• ICQ feeds

It’s about targeting the right few, not the undifferentiated many

Many B2B companies ask me whether social media is right for them. This post is all about why social media and B2B go hand in hand.

Social media is all about conversational marketing, and that’s why it works so well with a B2B strategy. Social media is not about the masses. It is about reaching your target audience. Listening before selling and hearing before talking.

Often businesses like to measure a social media campaign’s success by the number of followers its Twitter account has or the number of fans their Facebook page has. However, these measures are not necessarily the signs of a well-executed social media campaign.

Social media is all about the few rather than the many. The community you build up is ideally made up of the people who are most interested in your brand. If we apply the 80–20 rule here, we are speaking of the 20 percent who make up 80 percent of your business.

I find that B2B and B2C social media campaigns are quite similar in that they both target the opinion leaders whether they be the consumers or the business executives. These influencers lead the way for the rest of their followers.

B2B strategy, just like B2C strategy is all about networking — conversing with the right people, at the right time. The more in tune you are to things that are happening in your network, the more you increase your chances to be at the right place, at the right time.

According to eMarketer, in 2010 these will be the results for online marketing spending:

As you can see, website spending is forecast to rise 71 percent and social media spending will increase 60 percent in the next year.

It is apparent that companies are understanding that they need to: 1) create a social presence within social networks, and 2) create a website and/or blog that reflects an active online presence.

Why B2B companies use social networks

As to the reasons most B2B companies are using social networks, eMarketer had the following results:

As you can see, companies turn to social networks to show their leadership in their field, to find new potential customers by communicating with the community, to receive customer feedback and give customer service. There’s no better tool these days than Twitter to handle real-time customer service issues, and many brands do this beautifully, including ComcastCares, Dell, and Starbucks. They also advertise and do market research via social networks.

What about the reasons that companies use social media?

The top reason B2B companies (just like B2C companies) use social media is to generate awareness about their brand. The second top reason is to engage with customers on an ongoing basis. And the third top reason is to engage with top influencers on the Web.

Monitoring online conversations and responding to feedback is an extremely important element of social media, which only 14 percent of companies seem to understand.

B2B companies that are not using the social tools they have available today will find themselves at a major disadvantage against other B2B companies that are using LinkedIn, Twitter and similar networks to extend their reach and create better communication between the brand and their customers and potential customers.

Next time you doubt whether social media is right for B2B companies, think about what B2B strategy is all about: It is about the relationships and partnerships you build with your colleagues, and there’s no better way to do this today than through social media.

Image credit: StickyMessage

Yesterday I attended Jeff Pulver’s 140 Conference in Tel Aviv. I really enjoyed @thekotel’s presentation, which unfortunately I didn’t film — go to the twitter profile and check it out. Alon Nir is doing a remarkable job there.

The lecture I enjoyed in particular was Yedda CTO Yaniv Golan’s “The 140-characters Netscape,” where he said:

“I believe that in two years the Twitter brand will be in the same position as the Netscape brand is in now: Twitter will be credited with starting the revolution, and paving the road for followers. But at the same time, it will be pushed into a minor position in the market with other players taking the lead or, as is the case with Netscape, will no longer exist.”

It’s an interesting position and definitely a realistic one. What do you think? Do you see each of the big players creating their own Twitter-like services? Do you believe, as Yaniv does, that Twitter should switch to a WordPress type model? Check out the video above.

I was invited yesterday morning to the Biz Stone press conference hosted by the College of Management in Tel Aviv, Israel. For me personally, it was very exciting to meet one of the founders of the social platform that I love and admire the most. Biz didn’t surprise us with any new acquisition in Israel but mostly talked about the role that Twitter has been playing until now and what the future holds for the company. He did say that 2010 is the year that Twitter will start making real money.

For everyone who wanted to be there, but couldn’t, don’t say i didn’t think of you: Here’s the video (separated into two — one above and one below — due to YouTube limitations). Excuse the shaky camera.

Last week Eytan Galai, brother of Yaron Galai (founder of Quigo, which was sold to AOL) came to our offices to show us all the latest that’s been happening with Outbrain. For those who don’t know, Outbrain has recently launched its revenue program OutLoud.

For $10 a month, you can submit an interesting article to OutLoud. Outbrain will then take the articles you submitted — ranging from journalism and blog entries to press releases for which you want to get more visibility — and recommend them on relevant pages across thousands of sites using their content recommendation engine, ranging from USA Today, Slate, Fox and Tribune to Golf.com and the SportingNews.

When I started questioning the high monthly fee, Eytan insisted that I give him any two links I desire, which he will then put into the system and let me see the results for myself. Last Wednesday I sent Outbrain the links, and they were put into the system on Friday. Once I activated my account online I was able to get into the section called “Advertising Report.” There I found and could follow analytics data such as number of impressions and clicks for each link submitted.

From the start of our activity until now, I must say that the number of impressions has been quite high but the number of clicks signifcantly lower than I expected it to be, based on the fact that the links were supposed to be directed at a specific audience who enjoyed similar content. As my friend Eze Vidra from VCCafe put it:

“In essence, OutLoud provides a cost-effective way to target sponsored articles to organic content on leading publisher sites and thousands of blogs. In comparison with ‘normal’ PPC advertising, Outloud catches the users in a ‘reading mode’ rather than a ‘researching’ or ’shopping’ mode, which is often the case with SEM promotion.”

Please note that I was told by Outbrain on Sunday that one of my links was not indexed properly so I should be seeing better results pretty soon. Today, Monday, I must say I do like the fact that there are no limitations on how many impressions I can receive for each link submitted.

So who submits links to OutLoud? According to Outbrain:

• The excited marketer wanting to drive word-of-mouth by amplifying positive reviews and articles about their company
• The proud blogger who wants their most brilliant posts to reach a larger audience
• The innovative PR professional trying to find new ways to distribute press releases and earned media
• The social media director, trying to build community by exposing larger audiences to a company blog, or to conversations happening on other sites about their products
• The passionate blog reader who fell in love with an article which perfectly expresses her point-of-view and who wants to make sure others are exposed to it too

The payoff for a subscription

The link(s) that are put in the OutLoud system continuously receive more and more impressions. As Outbrain says on its blog:

“At $10, OutLoud is really a no-brainer. If you analyze the opportunity for more than a few minutes, you’ve already spent more than you would by just trying it. Imagine, thousands of people exposed to your chosen content for less than the cost of a beet salad.”

While this is all true, and I think the idea itself is excellent, $10 is still quite a substantial fee for which I still think I deserve a cool feature like knowing which specific blogs my link appeared on and how many clicks it got in each blog.

Despite the lower than expected click through rate I am experiencing at this point I am more than confident in Outbrain’s capability to deliver at the end due to its strong team. Outbrain is turning out to be an innovative thinker in finding ways to monetize itself and at the same time stick to its philosophy of giving more value to readers.

The question is: Will it be able to monetize and at the same time promise completely relevant content all the time? Time will tell. I have a lot of faith in these guys who I believe have gathered quite a substantial amount of information about blogs until now and will continue to grow the number of sites using their content recommendation engine. Such factors will obviously determine the success of OutLoud and its ability to keep even paid links of top quality and relevant to the content at hand.