Social media is booming, but is all of the activity surrounding its growth a precursor to a dot-com-like bubble burst? While in some ways investors may overextend themselves on the social media trend as much as any other social media is growing to become a trend that is based on countless tiny bubbles rather than the huge risk-takers that we're used to seeing in the media limelight. At is core social media is about human communications returning to normal levels of discourse that may have been forgotten in the push to cash in on electronic content - and that will require more sophisticated monetization models than those being pursued by most media companies.

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Labels: econSM, News Analysis, Social Media, Web 2.0 Expo

The EconSM event is living up expectations for a great networking environment, including bumping into a new company called Edgeio, which provides classified ad systems on a white label basis for publishers of all kinds. The concept behind Edgeio is fairly simple but compelling: use their technology to build up easy-to-track classified ads from individuals and get them placed contextually in appropriate content. You can use just the technology to build your own ad service or syndicate in content from publishing partners using Edgeio. The publishers are in complete control of how ads are priced (or not) with Edgeio taking a percentage of revenues, typically 20 percent. This has good use for publishers in general, but it appears to be especially well positioned for social media, especially Wiki-based microcommunities. As communities grow they can spawn of new microcommunities that can use Edgeio to exchange ads with the parent community and to draw in other highly related communities. There's a lot of talk about scalability in online advertising and marketing at EconSM today but not much talk yet about how classifieds are the perfect one-to-one marketing medium for social media. Expect tools like this to thrive for highly targeted social media content - and to form the base for tools that help higher-powered marketers to reach customers on a one-to-one basis.

Labels: advertising, business models, econSM, media, Social Media, Technology, Trends

Maybe I am getting jaded but as good as some of the events that I've attended and helped to organize have been as of late it's been many years since I've attended an executive-level conference that's had as much energy and buzz as EconSM. About five hundred of paidContent.org's closest friends decided to pop in at the Beverly Hilton to hear an all-star lineup of leading publishers, technologists and other industry heavies that you rarely find in one spot. The agenda for the day: every angle on making social media pay that one could hope to cover.

As usual, I'll post links here to the detailed coverage of each segment of the program that we post on our Events weblog. I'll be posting a News Analysis piece later this week covering this event and aspects of the recent Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

CEOs Speak Up

Social Media Meets Marketing

Social Media Meets Hollywood

Social Media Meets News

Social Media Meets Mobile Media

Social Media Meets Deals

Labels: econSM, events