As someone who isn’t ingrained in the culture of advertising, I felt like I was in a foreign land at the ad:tech conference in San Francisco. That is, until every other word I heard at the conference was “social”. Now that’s something I feel comfortable talking about.

Don’t get me wrong, there was a lot of discussion about ROI, CPC, CPM, and all of the other usual advertising jargon. But for me, it felt like the advertising community was just getting its feet wet with monetizing social services, even though Facebook and Twitter have been around for quite some time now.

The problem with advertising on social properties is that its users are continual moving targets. When I’m on Facebook, it’s easy for me to leave Facebook quite often. As soon as someone posts a link, I’m out of there. The same goes for Twitter. What advertisers and marketers haven’t quite grasped yet is the concept of engagement.

Even though Facebook has over 850 million users, they’re not sitting back watching ads like those who are watching the Super Bowl. They’re changing the “channel” constantly, and the response to that has been to track those users wherever they go. That’s not going to cut it, so brands are going to have to actually dig in and do some long tail work if they want to grab eyeballs and clicks.

Take us with you!!!!

One of the concepts that was kicked around quite a bit at ad:tech is engagement with potential customers through rewards. By making your marketing message “shareable”, you can give people incentives to carry your message with them wherever they go. That’s the smart way to do things, and if brands start giving things out to people for watching their ads or mentioning them on their Timeline, that’s where some money can start flowing.

Take a company I saw this week for example, it’s called Fanzy. The company created a Facebook app that lets customers not only become fans of a brand, but want to become an even bigger fan by way of rewards.

By creating “super fans”, you’re cutting out the need for spending ad dollars on “remnants”, meaning the crap that is leftover on ad networks that only get in front of people who will probably never click on a link you pay to display, or buy what you’re selling. By engaging people, brands can focus on the folks who can really spread the word about them and their product.

Fanzy got it right and I hope that advertisers paid attention. Something tells me that they didn’t, though. “Engaging” people sounds like hard work, because it is. It’s also something that a company has to adopt throughout the entire staff, or at least the teams that interact with customers. It’s much easier to pay a crap-ton of money for a bunch of display ads and *hope* that people click on them. It’s all advertisers know, and it’s the only option that advertising networks have given them.

Engage or die

A flashy ad unit isn’t going to do the trick to get people’s attention any more on the web, it’s a completely different ballgame now. The TV ads we see now are laced with hashtags and requests for Likes on Facebook, it’s becoming commonplace.

What companies have to really figure out though is how to turn those hashtags and Likes into continual business, interaction, and word of mouth. That’s the “everything else” that comes along with the social web, and I don’t think advertisers are prepared to deal with it yet.

Just being on Facebook and Twitter has turned into the mad rush to get a website up in the 90′s, and it’s not enough anymore. Having intelligent and friendly people behind those accounts continually engaging your customers are the only way to keep them.

No matter what new fancy and flashy ad unit some advertising network comes up with, you’re going to have to roll up your sleeves and engage. Otherwise, kiss your marketing dollars goodbye.

I’m here at the ad:tech conference in San Francisco and one thing is certain; as hard as Silicon Valley is working to create new social products, the advertising industry is working that much harder to keep up with the innovation.

Monetization is a dirty word when it comes to social services on the web, however, most of us forget that to create a sustainable product and business, making money from users is the only way to survive. Sure, you can raise gobs of money like Twitter, but even it has introduced its own ad model to rake in some cash to stay afloat.

In an era where everyone expects something for free, asking someone to pay a monthly fee for their Facebook account seems absolutely absurd. How can Facebook make money then? Advertising, of course. The problem is that the advertising model that has kept the web making money is old and isn’t performing as well as it has in the past. We’re all trained to skip over certain types of ads, and at some point our eyes simply won’t “see” them anymore.

How are these social services going to make the ads more relevant and interesting to us? Our data, of course. All of the things that you “Like” on Facebook and retweet on Twitter will be factored into the type of advertising that you see. The closer the ad is to your actual interests, the better chance there is that you’ll click. Makes sense, but it’s starting to kick up dust when it comes to privacy.

Recently, Senator Al Franken gave a speech where he delivered the line:

…accumulating data about you isn’t just a strange hobby for these corporations. It’s their whole business model. And you are not their client. You are their product.

We don’t mind telling Facebook who our friends are and what TV shows that we like to watch, but now that it wants to make money, people are starting to fuss about it and now realize how important their privacy online may be. It’s a fine line, and when it comes to social services that we pour private data into, it’s all fun and games until they try to make a buck off of us.

That leads us to the ad:tech conference, advertisers and companies who display ads are trying to come up with the right way to get us to “pay the bills” without creeping us out or turning us off completely.

Just how many companies are working on solving this problem? Take a look at a report compiled by a company called LUMA Partners, called the LUMAscape:

If you click through and see how all of the parts fit together, there are companies that sit as middle men between social networks and ad networks, middle men for those middle men, and more. I spent about a half hour last night digging through this mapping and it made my eyes cross.

At the end of the day, we’re going to be shown advertising whether we like it or not. Take “on demand” television for example. When I watch a TV show or Movie on Comcast, they don’t let me skip through the commercials. That’s my way of paying to see the content. Sure, if I wanted to see it ad-free, I could go to a service like iTunes and pay for it, but I enjoy “free”. Free comes with a cost, and that cost is our eyeballs and data.

There are companies here at ad:tech who are trying to make the advertising model more interactive though, while keeping our privacy safe. Companies like Google track our activity as we surf the web and display ads to us based on those preferences. It’s getting them into a bit of trouble though, and that behavioral tracking and ad display is starting to freak people out.

One company that’s paying attention to this space is called TRUSTe, and it launched an advertising platform at the conference that allows consumers to opt out of specific types of ads and give some feedback to advertisers on what they’d rather see. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than what we have today. Here’s an interview that my good friend Jake Ludington did with TRUSTe’s VP of Product, Kevin Trilli:

What Trilli keys in on is the fact that users are starting to think about their privacy and the best way to handle those concerns is to give consumers choice in return. Again, ads aren’t going away no matter what, so is this type of “choice” good enough? It’s the best option that I see right now, simply because users are already behaving in a social way on platforms like Facebook. Giving its users a choice on what they’d like to see, and how they’re targeted, is the best way to interact.

The more transparent the industry is, the quicker it can grow and monetize. Yes, thinking about being a “product” is a bit scary as a user, but as long as we have control over how our information is shared and with who, we can settle into the idea that this is nothing more than having to watch ads when you fire up On Demand on your TV.

Today I was hanging out at the ad:tech conference in San Francisco, which consists mainly of marketing professionals who are looking for the best way to integrate social into their advertising campaigns. During a keynote with Guy Kawasaki and our friend Robert Scoble, the location-aware app Highlight was mentioned. A few times. And by a few, I mean about twenty. That’s cool though, Robert is a huge fan of the app and let us know that fifteen people in the room also used the app.

I wasn’t sure how the Highlight app fit into a discussion about trends in advertising, until Mr. Scoble dropped a bit of a teaser about an upcoming feature and functionality of the app:

Highlight shows you who’s around you, and soon…what’s around you.

His tone was extremely coy, as if he had just let a purring cat out of the bag. This kind of functionality isn’t new though, remember foursquare’s “Radar’ feature? The idea is that you’d turn this feature on and you’d be pinged with a notification when you became close to a popular location on the platform.

Only problem is, like Highlight, it eats the shit out of your phone’s battery:

I’ve made it clear that I’m personally not a fan of location-aware apps like Highlight, but if you’re in the Bay Area, there’s no way to get away from it. People are talking about it at meetups, mixers, and conferences, so there’s definitely a market for services like it.

If we take the battery drain issue out of the equation, people are finding this type of “always-on” real-time sharing to be helpful. If Highlight does indeed launch the feature that Scoble mentioned today, I can see how it could leap-frog foursquare’s Radar feature, which hasn’t gotten a lot of love from the team lately, and build a nice platform for small businesses to draw attention to themselves.

It’s surprising how much of the “creepy” factor we’ll ignore when we’re getting something “valuable” in return, but that’s how all of the big companies are handling things these days. We give all of our data to Google and Facebook but don’t worry about it since we’re getting something we use daily in return.

We’re not sure how soon this feature will be made available, but we’ll keep you up to date.

Are you a fan of location-aware apps? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Involver is a company that you might have never heard of, but one that helps companies create things that you see all of the time on Facebook. Involver does enterprise level social marketing management, which might sound boring at first, and invented SML (social markup language), which powers thousands of apps on Facebook.

The company sells its services through agencies, who then turn them around to companies trying to engage their customers, and potential customers, on the gigantic social network.

The tools that Involver currently provides requires in-depth technical knowledge, which is often a stumbling block for these larger companies looking to get social, fast. Today at ad:tech, a conference in San Francisco catering to advertisers and marketers, the company is launching a new product called “Visual SML”, which is comprised of easy drag-and-drop interfaces so that marketers and non-technical people at these companies can get apps out the door quickly.

According to Senior Director of Product Marketing at Involver, Roland Smart, this product has been at the top of the list when it comes to feature requests from customers:

As more and more companies expand their social media presence, the people who control that content want direct input into the result. But that doesn’t mean that they want cookie-cutter solutions. They want a solution that is simple to design but still produces compelling results. Visual SML is designed specifically for those who need to create these types of engaging Facebook experiences but can’t afford to make every page an expensive technical services task.

Without any front-end expertise needed, anyone in an organization can use the visual authoring tool to get an app off the ground quickly. Additionally, multiple people within your organization can make edits to these tools without interrupting a developer from their other work or disrupting a development cycle completely.

Here’s what these tools look like:

Involver has also done an overhaul of their monitoring product and backend user interface. It’s more of a conversation suite, a “hybrid of Hootsuite, threaded messages like Email”, Smart tells me. You can assign messages to people, using it as a complete backend system for support and social interaction.

There are quite a few companies showing off their stuff at ad:tech and we’ll be sure to let you know what’s hot when it comes to the merging of the social and advertising worlds.