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The latest Technology Review has an interesting article about social network business and how social networks still have a lot of challenges to monetize their communities. New models, but also new solutions, are needed. And a key issue is to get advertising work properly in the social media.

Technology Review summarizes the new technologies to get advertising work in social media: “Startups that help advertisers and marketers better target the users of social-networking sites are fashionable investments for venture capitalists in North America and Europe. Such startups hope to sell advertisers detailed information about individual social networkers. They include the brand-new 33Across (which we profile in our list of 10 notable startups, which begins on page 50) and the more established Finnish company Xtract, which counts Vodafone, T-Mobile, and Blyk among its customers and has begun selling its software to advertising agencies and online marketers and publishers. ”

Jason Pontin, Editor in Chief and Publisher of Technology Review, commented in the Millenium Prize event that our solution is the most complete solution he has seen for solving “the multi-billion dollar problem.” It is nice to see that we have really found a way to build solutions to monetize digital communities.

We have a new white paper online on the topic Social Advertising Intelligence: How to reach consumers with active advertising.

Customers are increasingly moving from mass broadcast media to social media, making current advertising processes less effective than before. Until now, the tools for planning and buying online and mobile advertising have been lacking.

In the white paper, we analyze the four main challenges that advertisers face with online and mobile advertising, that is:

1. Measuring the full impact of the ads
2. Lack of tools
3. Ads cannot be bought in a unified way
4. Lack of information on online users

The white paper also presents, how Xtract Social Advertising Intelligence can be used to target campaigns effectively, solving some of the challenges with multi-channel advertising.

Did you find the white paper useful? Was there something missing? All feedback is welcome!

Google has published their mobile and social network platform plans during the last week. Not so many surprises.

OpenSocial is quite natural next move from a company that wants to collect a lot of data. Social networking platform is a valuable source of behavior and social network data. And it is much more than have one or two social sites. The main concept with mobile has similar objectives. Who will dominate mobile usage and social data in the future. And finally who will prevail in digital media marketing.

But is it so simple that one company can prevail all relevant data in the future. Is it even possible that one company can collect all data when there will be more and more data all the time everywhere? I believe they can collect a lot of data. But on the other hand I believe that the services and data will be much more de-centralized in the future.

Intelligence comes nearer users and user devices. Smart analytics, customer profiling, and social intelligence come also to terminals (PC or mobile). The best solution to challenge Google is not to try to collect more data, but to have more intelligence to utilize the data. And this kind of analytics and advertising solutions help media and mobile companies to challenge Google.

In the early days of Web 1.0, micropayments were going to arrive any day now. Most web pages were written out of sheer enthusiasm, and micropayments looked like a viable economic model of the web. Instead of getting the content for free, you would have paid a small amount, say one cent, per page view. That would not have hit anybody’s wallet too hard, yet the most favorite web authors would have got a substantial compensation.
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There has been an active discussion whether social communities are a fad. It was said that even Steve Ballmer thinks they are only a fad. Engagement marketing gurus, like Alan Moore, think communities are something fundamental for human beings. Here is my prediction: Internet communities as we know them today are a fad, but social networks and communities will be a fundamental part of all Internet and mobile services and marketing. I just flew from London to San Francisco and had time to read some articles and really thought this question. Communities like Facebook and MySpace are now very popular, but I see they are only the first step and still quite artificial social networking between people. Advertisers have seen the value already today, and we at Xtract also offer tools for find the right people and communities for each advertising campaign. Individual community services comes and disappears but the phenomenon itself will live. But this is only a starting point. People have many other services they use daily in the Internet. They live with their mobiles 24/7. It cannot be so that your social activities and at the same time community marketing intelligence is limited only to certain web sites. Social network perception will be a fundamental part of everything people develop for the Internet and mobile in near future. And community marketing intelligence will live inside all services and platforms in the future to offer better usability and more relevant and effective advertising.