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Consumers are fine with ads on social networks, but do not find them targeted to their needs and desires, according to a new Prospectiv survey.

87 percent surveyed felt that ads didn’t match their preferences.

Of those:
– 58% felt that most ads do not match
– 29% felt that no ads match

Still, 85% of participants said they would prefer ad-supported networks to paying for premium sites. And these are the types of ads they respond to:

– One-off coupons and discount offers from the brands and products they
buy (62 percent)
– E-newsletters featuring coupons, discounts, news and tips about
favorite brands (24 percent)
– Invitations to join interactive email groups, online forums and social
networks for sharing and communicating (14 percent)

Prospectiv surveyed 800 people who use sites like Facebook, MySpace, Hi5 and Friendster.

“These poll results clarify that members of social networking sites are open to offers and promotions as long as they are targeted to their interests,” said Jere Doyle, Prospectiv’s CEO. “The next step for the web publishing industry seeking to monetize their online communities is to improve ad relevance, and the best way to do this is to work with online lead generation providers and ad networks that have the brand relationships, technologies and services to ensure that the ads presented are tailored to their audience’s needs and wants.”

What do you think about the data? What kind of ads should be used on social networks? Leave us a comment and let us know!

Related Reading:
How to (Actually) Earn Money (Now) with Social Media (Really): Part 1
How to (Actually) Earn Money (Now) with Social Media (Really): Part 2
Social Media Meets Local Search
Social Media Marketing for Small Business

If you’ve wanted to ride the social media marketing wave by adding social features to your website, but the economy has you worried about spending lots of money on apps, then get excited. Google is again coming to the rescue by offering a free service for you to get your social media game on.

After Google’s Campfire One event tonight, website owners will be able to utilize Friend Connect (http://www.google.com/friendconnect). Basically, it’s social applications for the coding-challenged. Visitors to sites using Friend Connect will be able to “see, invite, and interact with new friends, or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web, including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more.”

David Glazer, Director of Engineering at Google had this to say: “Google Friend Connect is about helping the ‘long tail’ of sites become more social. Many sites aren’t explicitly social and don’t necessarily want to be social networks, but they still benefit from letting their visitors interact with each other. That used to be hard. Fortunately, there’s an emerging wave of social standards — OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and the data access APIs published by Facebook, Google, MySpace, and others. Google Friend Connect builds on these standards to let people easily connect with their friends, wherever they are on the web, making ‘any app, any site, any friends’ a reality.”

What do you think about Friend Connect? Plan to add it to your site? Share your thoughts by leaving a comment.

Related Reading:
SLI Systems Joins Bazaarvoice Radius to Help Marketers Execute Integrated Social Commerce Strategies

Nielsen has released data showing the popularity of social networks being used via mobile phones in the UK. Here are three key takeaway points:

Almost half (44%) of UK mobile phone subscribers belong to an online social network. Of this group, one in four (25%) use their mobile phone for social networking-related activities

• Around 812,000 Britons each month, or 1.7% of all UK mobile subscribers, visited a social networking website using their mobile during the first quarter of 2008
• Facebook is the most popular site for mobile social networking, being visited by over half a million Britons (557,000) from their mobiles, or 9% of all UK Mobile Internet subscribers

Kent Ferguson, Client Services Manager, Nielsen Mobile had this to say about the data: “Social networking is already a global phenomenon, and mobile could be the next big thing in the space. Large numbers of people are interacting with their social networking profiles while they’re on the move. There could be increased consumer demand for mobile social networking driven by the flat fee price plans offered by the leading operators that give subscribers unlimited mobile Internet access.”

So what do you think? Are social media and mobile phones colliding? Leave a comment and let us know!

Though Bill Gates was out there telling people Microsoft is not interested in making non-Yahoo acquisitions right now (at least in the search/social world), word comes that Microsoft bankers have sent “feelers” to Facebook about a full acquisition.

Here’s why this is a solid move:

1. Microsoft already owns 1.6% stake in Facebook, worth $240 million
2. Microsoft formed a data portability partnership with Facebook and 4 other networks
3. At least two Google execs have jumped ship to Facebook in recent months

While Facebook has yet to “overtake” MySpace in the social media market, it is a viable competitor. And I’m sure Ballmer would love for Microsoft to own a social network that even Apple has used as a marketing ploy as of late. Recent commercials for the iPhone entice potential customers through the ability to access Facebook on the popular mobile device.

Additionally, internet users are turning to their social networks during their search process. Consumers want answers and reviews and social networks help them get opinions from trusted sources.

The Facebook move would likely be seen by many as a better fit than Yahoo. But expect just as many to see it as a negotiating ploy in their bid for Yahoo. Though Microsoft has officially withdrawn its bid for Yahoo, many analysts expect Ballmer and the team to return to the table for another stab at a grab for the search engine.

Microsoft, in an clear attempt to compete with Google’s OpenSocial, has announced a partnership to create data portability across 5 social networking sites. Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Tagged and LinkedIn are all part of the arrangement, which will “exchange functionally-similar Contacts APIs.” Microsoft says the move will allow them to create a safe, secure two-way method for users of the sites to move their relationships among the respective services.

Microsoft is including Windows Live Messenger in the mix. Invite2messenger.net was developed to help users invite their friends from the five social networks to join their Windows Live Messenger contact list, if they have one.

What’s unclear is what Microsoft would do with Yahoo if the proposed acquisition takes place. Earlier today, it was announced that Yahoo has joined Google’s OpenSocial. And AOL’s Bebo is now part of Microsoft’s data portability network, which should fan the flames of some analysts’ commentary that Microsoft should buy AOL instead. The soap opera continues.

Today at Search Engine Strategies New York, Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis unveiled the latest set of features at the social search engine: My Mahalo.

My Mahalo is a service, currently in beta, that allows users to import their ratings and reviews from other social media sites, and share them with contacts on Mahalo Social. That service, which launched December, is similar to Yahoo’s delicious service. It lets users recommend and share links, or see recommendations from friends and top Mahalo users.

With My Mahalo, the social features are becoming more prominent. Mahalo pages will now show pictures of friends that have expressed an interest in that topic on Mahalo, or have imported their reviews from other social media sites, such as Facebook, MySpace or niche sites like GoodReads.com.

“We’re taking the information that’s available on the social graph, and putting it where you need it,” Calacanis told SEW.

Instead of having to visit several social media sites to find the various comments, ratings, reviews and other content your friends have created, Mahalo users can see all of that info in one place, if their friends have imported their data into Mahalo. So a search for the movie Bladerunner will show you how many of your friends have seen the movie, how many want to see it, how many reviewed it, etc.

Users who have installed the Mahalo toolbar will be asked when they visit another social media site whether or not they’d like to import their content from those sites to Mahalo. Then, when users search on Mahalo, they will be presented with content first from their friends, followed by the most trusted Mahalo users. Mahalo users build trust by recommending links, and by having those links accepted by the Mahalo guides and added to a page.

“We’re not competing with social networks. We see ourselves as the bridge between social networks and search,” Calacanis said. “We’re building a system where people can openly help each other and share.”

At launch, My Mahalo will feature five types of content: places & trips, products, music, movies and books.

UPDATE: TechCrunch “is hearing” that Yahoo will join Open Social in April. Still in rumor stage.

If Yahoo joins the OpenSocial alliance, Microsoft and Facebook may find themselves out in the cold.

The New York Times is reporting that Yahoo intends to join Google’s OpenSocial Alliance, placing increased pressure on Facebook, the only major social network yet to join the development network.

Last year, Facebook signed an ad deal with Microsoft, effectively placing the popular social networking site between a rock and a hard place when it comes to social web application standards.

OpenSocial already boasts a Who’s Who list of social networks. MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn, Ning, Orkut, Six Apart, Friendster, Xing and many others, including old-school Oracle and Salesforce.com, are participating in the alliance. While Yahoo is not a social network, it does boast the largest number of registered users. The company believes it could receive great benefit from opening up its site to developers.

So what implications does this have on a possible Microsoft-Yahoo deal? It may make it tougher for Microsoft to “untangle” Yahoo initiatives, but it’s unlikely to derail the bid altogether. Don’t look for Microsoft to join OpenSocial anytime soon.

Google launched OpenSocial last fall, as an initiative to develop a common set of APIs that can be used across several different social networking sites, in an effort to draw developers to an open platform. Earlier this week, Google made another play for web developers by announcing its I/O Web Forward developers conference, planned for later this spring.

The New York Times, CNET, InformationWeek, and 52 other Google News sources missed the significance of Microsoft’s new Research Lab in Cambridge, Mass., headed by Jennifer Chayes and her husband, Christian Borgs. The Times implied that Chayes and Borgs work in an ivory tower where basic research doesn’t have a business imperative.

Nothing could be further from the truth in the online world.

Jennifer Tour Chayes, PhD in mathematical physics, led the highly esteemed Theory Group specializing in theoretical computer science. She’s the co-author of almost 100 scientific papers and co-inventor of more than 20 patents. The New York Times only mentions her work in developing simple models of liquids and solids and the development of some exceedingly fast networking algorithms. Hunh?

Their groundbreaking work in search engine algorithms and social search may be the foundation of a successful Microsoft-Yahoo merger.

Chayes is one of the world’s experts in the modeling and analysis of random, dynamically growing graphs (social graph, social search, Facebook, MySpace) – which are used to model the Internet, the World Wide Web and social networks.

One of the papers the couple co-authored, “Bid optimization in online advertisement auctions”, details the ways paid search campaigns can be optimized by advertisers and search engines. “Multi-unit auctions with budget-constrained bidders”, written by Borgs, Chayes, Nicole Immorlica (MIT), Mohammad Mahdian, and Amin Saberi (published in June 2005), discusses ways to optimize revenue for search engines given the fixed budgets of search marketers.

Their recent work provides a tutorial on search engine optimization and PageRank, before delving deep into algorithms few search marketers (myself included) understand.

Search engine optimization lives and dies by PageRank. Here’s what you need to know about their research into PageRank.

Click to read the rest of this post…

Reading the search headlines these days, it may seem like we’ve gone a long way to get right back where we started: human-generated search. Well, not exactly where we started; these new breed of search engines aren’t human-powered in the same way DMOZ and the original Yahoo were, they’re algorithmic search engines that have been human-enhanced by allowing searchers to rank or vote on results, and even to tag or comment on them—much like social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit do.

And they are growing in popularity, with some of the biggest names in search behind them. Jason Calcanis, entrepreneur poster-boy and SEO public enemy #1, recently introduced an update to Mahalo , his human-powered engine, that adds aggregation of user profiles and pages from various social networks . Matt Cutts hinted that Google was integrating social interaction into results and we’re beginning to see Google test it. And Google’s best friend, Jimmy Wales, is making headway with Wikia Search, his admittedly “poor” but improving search engine that integrates the philosophies of Wikimedia and user-generated content.

So are human-enhanced search engines really the future? And if they are, is that a good thing?

Click to read the rest of this post…

The prominent players in our space may not have the impact they think they have, if you follow the ideas explored in Guy Kawasaki’s recent blog post.

Having read the article and the stories it links out to, I have to say that the dynamic of the web may have changed who and what has sway and how things become popular in the internet age. With the myriad of social networks and fun interactive tools everyone has access to these days, is it any wonder that authority is a fleeting thing and the power of influence can fall in the hands of flip teenagers and cranky seniors who can turn a creative phrase.

Trendsetters may no longer be the term of the new millennium - maybe hip is giving way to hap - as in happenstance. I am waiting for my 15 year-old to use that term - “he is so hap” and I will know I am on to something.

I read a lot of different blogs and occasionally read Guy’s - but it was so ‘hap’ that I found this one today…..