A strategic partnership to maximize social marketing ROI was just announced between comScore, Inc. and Buddy Media.

It’s a strategic alliance that leverages the outfits' respective digital skills: Buddy Media, known for its all-in-one social media management system for Facebook campaigns, and comScore, a global Internet information provider about consumer behavior driving successful marketing and sales strategies.

Clients using Buddy Media’s social marketing suite and comScore Social Essentials measurement service can now optimize social communications via owned media and quantify the impact of earned media with metrics including reach/frequency, demographics, online behavior and competitive benchmarking of brands.

“comScore’s partnership with Buddy Media provides ‘behind the wall’ access to exposure and engagement via their 2 million-strong opt-in panel, and opens up insights that then can be easily activated via Buddy Media’s tools,” wrote CEO Michael Lazerow on the Buddy Media blog.Continue reading...

The latest figures are bullish on social media as a sustainable revenue-producing platform as indicated by Facebook's own performance. Reuters reports revenues reached $1.6bn for the first half of 2011 with net income at $500m, while Goldman Sachs claimed Facebook revenues totaled $1.2bn for the first three quarters of 2010 with net income of $355m.  

The billion-dollar question for brands looking to build their own business model on Facebook: how to attract the right type of Facebook fans? And what are they looking for?

Hitwise estimates that each new Facebook fan generates on average 20 additional visits to a retailer’s website, citing UK retailer John Lewis’ efforts to attract and engage fans on its Facebook page.

One tip for retailers on Facebook: Author Facebook posts on Wednesdays, according to a new report from Buddy Media. If they do, they’ll reap 8% more engagement than from other days, a change from last April when Sunday was the best day.

Short posts apparently perform best, with messages longer than 80 characters (the Twitter effect?) garnering 40% lower engagement, and too many posts also decreasing engagement. Brands posting three or more messages daily had 25% lower like rates and 42% lower comment rates.Continue reading...

Buddy Media, the WPP-backed Facebook management system, is taking on Europe and opening a headquarters in London. A $54 million raise (Series D funding) is fueling a seemingly indefatigable global expansion as the company continues to dominate the social media enterprise software space.

A new group of late-stage investors, including Insight Venture Partners, joined current Buddy Media investors GGV Capital, Institutional Venture Partners and Bay Partners.

Buddy Media serves eight of the world’s top ten global advertisers including Nivea, Bacardi, All Saints, Vodafone and Mercedes Benz. In 2011, the company added 165-plus new customers, including Kraft Foods, Hanes, ESPN, Ford Motor Company and Virgin Mobile USA.Continue reading...

Hearst Magazines Digital Media unit is now the the first publisher to launch a scalable social platform for thirteen of its brands with Buddy Media on Facebook, making it the largest publisher presence on the Buddy Media Platform. 

Buddy Media will power Hearst’s ‘sapplets’ — branded social media applications — a boon for advertisers that extends content from participating brand sponsors and drive e-commerce traffic.  

The ‘sapplets,’ available on Facebook in July (with additional roll-out in August) cover 13 Hearst media properties including Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, RealBeauty.com, Redbook and Marie Claire, marking the latest foray in Hearst's increasing digital marketing prowess.Continue reading...

Apple's iPhone is launching into deep space.

AT&T accused of buying nonprofit support (including GLAAD) for its merger.

Buddy Media preparing for an IPO?

Dell picks China for Streak 10 tablet launch.

Diet Coke launches fashion site with Yahoo UK.

Microsoft appears ready to phase out Zune brand.Continue reading...

Luxury brands that don't allow fans to post comments on their Facebook walls score lower for engagement (and "Facebook success") than those that do.

That's just one of the findings from a new report that rates the Facebook savvy of 100 luxury brands across Auto, Beauty, Fashion, Watches and Jewelry, and Spirits and Champagnes.

The L2 "Prestige 100" Facebook report, produced in partnership with Buddy Media, gives top marks to  the top three brands on Facebook are BMW, Clinique, and Audi, #1-3 respectively. Each brand was scored against more than 200 qualitative and quantitative data points and ranked across four criteria: Size & Growth, Engagement, Programming and Integration.

Automotive and Beauty brands nabbed the top seven spots in the ranking, with the Watch & Jewelry industry earning the lowest average Facebook IQ. 

The Top 10 luxury brands on Facebook, according to the new report:Continue reading...

"We want the whole world to use Facebook to share and connect," says Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in her cover story in the new issue of Bloomberg Businessweek.

She also wants brands to be part of that equation, as advertising is the key driver of monetization and growth as she scales the site and prepares for what's bound to be a landmark IPO in the next year.

With Facebook's user base booming, but the site's execs still figuring out the privacy balance of exposing what it calls a user's "social graph" to targeted advertising (from turning user activity into ads that may eventually appear on other sites, to brand-driven check-ins and now its latest foray: brand-tagging in photographs), the cover story is a must-read for anyone trying to learn from Facebook's ad strategy and business model, particularly "social ads."Continue reading...

Google is struggling to crack social, but it's not a home run internally. An anonymous employee tells the New York Times:

"There is some belief at Google that their DNA is not perfectly suited to build social products, and it’s a quite controversial topic internally." The social part of social media — cool factor, sharing, photos, following other’s every action — are apparently anathema to Googlers and engineers raised in a ‘utilitarian’ ethos, continues this deep throat. “Google’s made a lot of money helping people make decisions using search engines, but more and more people are turning to social outlets to make decisions,” said Charlene Li, founder of the Altimeter Group. “And whenever people make decisions, there’s money involved.”

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Ford’s recent Fiesta Movement and Focus Rally: America, are examples of social strategic moves that are being institutionalized, the automaker's head of social media, Scott Monty, tells SmartBlog: “We are in the process, right now, of training all our communications staff on social media, because we believe it's going to be built into the communications professional’s arsenal of the future…we’re moving from a kind of top-down model to a kind of hub-and-spoke model — and beyond that it’s a hub-and-spoke-and-dandelion process, so each of those spokes have their own expertise. And this not only happens at all the vehicles, but it’s going to happen at the global level as well — all of our regions, all of our countries.”Continue reading...