MySpace launches a new do-it-yourself CPC program for placing ads on its site.  The service launched in beta, allows anyone to promote their business on MySpace.com.
You can choose to either upload your own ad or create one by choosing from twelve templates created by MySpace. After selecting a template and uploading an image to place in your ad, users get to select their target audience: gender, age, region, city/state, and interests. For example, you can target women between the ages of 27-52 who live in California.

You also have the capability of setting the budget to what you are willing to spend on the overall ad campaign.  After reviewing the details of your ad campaign and providing your credit card number, you’re up and running.

Earlier this year, Facebook launched a very similar CPC program, with many of the same features for targeting users.  I am currently running a handful of clients in Facebook and the results are mixed so far. A client looking for good branding in either network should work well. It’s low cost traffic with the potential of reaching over 100 million users. If your product is a more niche, it may not perform as well in a social network. It’s a good idea to make sure you are making your demographic targeting very specific.

If you are running a CPC program in Facebook, it’s worth a shot to test the MySpace waters, and see how they both perform. It may just boil down to the demographics of each, with MySpace claiming to have a larger share of the 30 – 50 age group. With something new, I have always found that testing is usually the best way to go.

There has been a lot of hype and promotion recently with regard to incorporating Social Media into a company’s online marketing strategy.  Some of the biggest challenges are “how do we incorporate social media into our marketing strategy?”  And, “how is this going to help us grab a person’s attention?”

Well CNN gets it.  And you should too.  If you are wondering how to engage a larger audience and keep them engaged, check out how CNN is doing it.  One visit to their website, www.cnn.com, and you see they are all over the social media radar.  From RSS feeds, to Vlogs (Video Blogs), podcasts, and now… incorporating social media to create buzz and engage their audience live on the air!  Yup, you heard it right!  They are pulling the online world into the offline world right in front of you while you watch TV in your living room.  So, how are they able to do this in real time? Well, CNN is officially endorsing Twitter. They are the first major broadcasting network to do so, and they are doing a great job of incorporating it into their live broadcasting.  You’ll now find the likes of anchorman Don Lemon delivering a news story, then going to Twitter to see the direct impact of the story within the online Twitter community and announcing some of those comments live on the air.  It makes you want to go and check out CNN and Twitter, right?  I know I immediately started “tweeting” myself, hoping to get a comment in! 

This is social media done right!  Kudos to CNN and kudos to Don Lemon for laying such a foundation. So, you may be thinking, “Well that’s great, but what kind of online impact does social media really have?” Let’s look at CNN as compared to MSNBC, whom isn’t utilizing social media at the level CNN is.  One look at some online data utilizing Google Trends to see which website is receiving higher traffic volumes and it’s no surprise to see CNN is getting a great deal more online interest than MSNBC.  By CNN immersing itself into the online community, it’s seeing a direct impact with online buzz by people seeing CNN as their online news source. 

You can get started with this today.  If you already have a newsletter, then you can easily create an RSS feed on your website so others can download and share it.  You can start an online blog.  Make sure you post to it regularly!  Or, you can start podcasting.  Whatever direction is best for your company, you can easily get up to speed with web 2.0!  The internet is changing.  It is becoming a more interactive community.  No longer is a static website all you need.  More and more people are jumping online to interact with friends and businesses.  People are looking at customer reviews and corporate blogs to help them make decisions. If you can become more engaged, more social, in this ever changing online world, you’ll be sure to not get lost in the static.

A recent study by JupiterResearch reports that half of all advertisers are spending less than 5% of their online budgets on social media ads in 2008, which is a much smaller chunk of the pie compared to Search and Display. Larger marketers have been the most hesitant in getting more involved with advertising on Social Media due to challenges with measuring ROI and brand metrics.

Overall, marketers are still unclear on how to leverage this emerging channel and how to measure results. In addition, marketers have limited performance history to use as a comparison with the channel. Social Media publishers realize there are some issues, and are beginning to offer more tools to marketers to help ease any worries.

Social Media users are flocking to these sites, but that doesn’t equate to interaction with the ads. According to a recent MediaPost article, 54% of users never click on ads, 39% occasionally click on ads, and only 7% often respond to Social Ads.

As social media publishers like FaceBook and MySpace continue to offer more tools to advertisers to help them customize their campaigns, there should be a higher adoption of the channel and increased budgets should soon follow.