On January 16, 2009, I wrote, “What is the Value of a Facebook Fan”, which has been one of the more popular blogs I’ve written to date. In that blog, I valued a fan the way one would price an impression of a display ad. Simply put, for each fan you receive, 164 friends of theirs would be notified in their news feed (164 was the average number of friends each person had on Facebook in January 2009). So in essence, a fan is equal to receiving 164 ad impressions. I then applied an average CPM to determine the dollar value of the 164 ‘impressions’ you receive when someone becomes a fan of yours. This blog was done somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as I recognized that the ultimate value of a Facebook fan would be, “if you could conclude that as a result of someone becoming a fan, they influenced another person in their network to make a purchase from you, then that is when fans become profitable.”  At the time I wrote that blog, there was no way to see the influence that a fan had on their friends, so I used that CPM calculation to derive a dollar value.

Recently, I was exposed to a company that has developed a technology that allows marketers to find and market to people that are friends or “connections” to their current customers.  This company cannot do this over Facebook, so there still is a challenge in valuing a Facebook Fan in the “ultimate” way, but they can do this over many other aspects of the social landscape.

The company I learned about is called Media6Degrees (M6D).  M6D is a social targeting company that leverages the power of social media to identify new audiences to target for their clients. M6D does not use any personally identifiable information (PII) in order to build these new audiences, so it cannot carry out the ultimate tracking for a Facebook fan, as described above, but it can get us pretty close. M6D is interested in the entire social universe, which includes blogs, photo sites, sharing sites and social networks. M6D labels customers of their clients as brand loyalists, and then scours the social media landscape to find ‘connections’ to the brand loyalist without using PII to retarget. Typical retargeting shows display advertising to people that have already visited your site, but have not converted. M6D performs traditional retargeting, but also develops whole new audiences by ‘retargeting’ connections of the brand loyalists.

Here’s an example of how M6D might identify a friend of a brand loyalist to start retargeting to:

• The M6D pixel can identify the types of blogs one of their brand loyalists visits. It then discovers through the M6D network that someone else reads similar blogs. Given that some of these blogs are read by a very small audience, M6D makes an educated, data driven assumption that these two people might know each other, or at the very least, are similar in their interests. They call this the social graph. Once they identify this new person, they will then begin to target ads to this potentially new prospect using retargeting, even though this new person has never been to their customer’s site.

With most retargeting and ad networks, it is a challenge to prove their contributions to the bottom line because most marketers value the last click versus looking at the entire Purchase Path. When marketers do look at the entire Purchase Path and give value to introducers and influencers, in addition to closers, the real value of display advertising begins to show. If you are a current customer of ClearSaleing, and are also using Media6Degrees, we’d love to analyze your data to see how many conversions were introduced by M6D’s advanced targeting technologies.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 9th, 2010 at 11:00 am and is filed under All Blogs, Analytics, Lead Generation, Social Media, What's New?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.