'Net Features : social activity aggregator

Online Forum Advertising (With a Twist)

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 14:35:00 GMT

Does advertising within social media environments such as forums sound appealing? For many marketers it does but the problem is that those wanting to actively participate in the word-of-mouth conversations occurring are often called out as spammers thanks to often poorly disguised commercial messages.

PostRelease, launched by Cie Studios today, hopes to change that by enabling companies (through advertising) to reach audiences at the point where opinions are being formed and buying decisions made - on the forums. Companies can insert posts that contain relevant content into targeted online forum discussions using the automated system.

PostRelease posts can include text, pictures, hyperlinks and links to video. The posts are clearly marked as from PostRelease, and they remain in the lead position (toward the top of the post list page) of selected forum discussion categories for seven days. Once released from the top position, the post remains part of the forum discussion. These posts are archived as forum content, so they continue to generate responses after a campaign ends.

From the release: The approach is automated but audited – all posts are reviewed to ensure the content is relevant to the discussion topic. It is this quality control that sets PostRelease apart from banner and text ads: in its year-long beta, PostRelease click-through rates averaged 33 percent, with highs reaching nearly 90 percent.

By the looks of the PostRelease forum network, over 100 publishers are using the system, although it seems to be focused primarily on the automotive industry at the moment. I see a lot of potential in solutions like these for forum owners/publishers.

“Forums are where the real product conversations happen – they’re the uncut diamonds of the social web,” said Justin Choi, founder and president of Cie Studios. “Forums are an ideal place for marketers and consumers to meet, because product conversations are not intrusive, they’re integral. We’ve created a solution that enables companies to insert relevant information, helps consumers learn more about products they’re already discussing and gives forum owners a much-needed source of revenue.”

RedGage: Avoid or Consider?

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:31:00 GMT

RedGage has launched in public beta after 18 months in development. It's one of those Web services you are either going to love or absolutely hate.

RedGage is positioning itself as a centralized hub for users to earn money for the content they create and publish on sites like Flickr, Blogger, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. This means that photographers can important their Flickr feed, videographers can import their YouTube feed, and bloggers can import their weblog's RSS feed. Users are then compensated for this online content essentially leveraging their social graph to monetize "social activity."

The inherent flaw in the model of RedGage is it requires content publishers to send their Web users to the RedGage property instead of their own. That ultimately might be too significant a hurdle for many publishers to get over.

RedGage has essentially partnered with advertising networks (15 in total according to Daniel Redlich, CEO of RedGage) in order to compensate its users. The service pays its users roughly $1.00 US/per thousand impressions. There are actually a few factors (considered dynamically) in determining the actual payout including the quality of content, the users level of activity, and their level of influence.

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From a high-level there is seemingly some genuine value in a service like this. “Most people don’t realize that there is inherent economic value in what they’re creating online. It’s no secret that someone is making money; but, people like me, who spend time producing content, don’t usually share in any of the revenue from the companies who own the platforms,” said Redlich. “That’s why we built a system that gives money back to the creators. Web 2.0 democratized the distribution of content; RedGage is democratizing the monetization of content.”

Will you consider RedGage or avoid it entirely?
Share your thoughts by commenting below.

Distributed Social Activity Aggregator: Amplifeeder

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 27 May 2009 16:55:00 GMT

It's not often that you see something as progressive as a lifestreaming platform available, and even more rare when it's open source.

Amplifeeder has caught the attention of pretty much everyone in the know the past few months and for good reason. It's both useful and unique.

The app is similar in functionality to Sweetcron, a PHP solution which was covered in Website Magazine several months ago. The difference is that Amplifeeder is perhaps the first app we've seen whose backend was developed in ASP.NET (runs on industry standard ASP.NET 3.5, SQL Server Express and IIS). There are quite a few hosted lifestreaming Web apps (Tumblr, Onaswarm, Lifestrea.ms, Soup, Jaiku), but only a handful of solutions are available that can be hosted on your own server. Amplifeeder is perhaps the best on the market right now.

Users of the aggregator platform are able to combine their activity from different services (Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google Shared Items, Tumblr, Digg, Reddit, LastFM, Stumbleupon, Delicious, Upcoming, Mixx and many others) and style the themes as they see fit. There are actually quite a few impressive themes already, something which can't really be said for SweetCron. While using a lifestreaming app like Amplifeeder or SweetCron will not appeal to everyone, it is definitely an interesting way to present your social activiity.

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