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Graphing Social Patterns Conference - San Diego, March 2008

At Graphing Social Patterns in California a couple of weeks ago Craig Dwyer, EIR at Ariadne Capital was in attendance.

Its was really interesting to be part of a discussion with 500+ folks who are completely immersed in the social networking environment, the conference was a mix of technology, marketing and business.

One trend, building on the concept of the social networks as a platform, is that the developers are launching social and viral applications with unprecedented ease and speed, and learning in real time the dynamics of the business. 'Virallity', and 'engagement' were key watchwords in the conversation and the ability to launch applications so quickly, without having to worry about all the social networking aspects was clearly delivering huge value.

There was a big discussion about monetization, and in one panel of four agency start ups (none older than 9 months old) all of them were profitable. It was also evident that the big brands and advertisers are seeing the value of viral and social aspects of the campaigns they can now run. Some of the social digital agencies talked about applications costing anywhere for $5K to $150K (although on the IRC back channel there was significant astonishment at the high end number).

Amit Kapur, the COO of Myspace discussed their Hyper Targeting advertising offering, and explained how they were doing far more data mining on the actual user from their social graph than they had been previously. They gave an example of a 300% gain in relevancy of adds served.

Google were also in force and took one session to walk through the OpenSocial API model in greater detail. Through OpenSocial developers can develop more easily for multiple websites, and some key partners such as Myspace, Bebo, Plaxo and Linkedin are already onboard.

As the social networks space evolves, and continues to consume more and more of users web time, its will be interesting to see how start-ups use existing communities and groups to promote and drive new services.

Links:
http://en.oreilly.com/gspwest2008/public/content/home
http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/

Megatrends from the 2008 Regent Conference

The Regent Conference is always a good event to gather one's thoughts on the sector and the outlook for the next period. For those of you who don't know, the Regent Conference is run by Intellect and sponsored each year by M&A boutique Regent Associates. This year, the 13th, speakers included representatives from Forrester, Google, Symbian, Garlik, Regent and Arete.

Read a summary of the key themes of the event here

"The implications of digital for agency business models"

by Hamish Pringle, Director General, IPA

In 2006, the IPA commissioned the Future Foundation, a leading forecasting consultancy, to explore what lay in store for advertising industry and agencies over the next 10 years. To do this, the IPA and the Future Foundation carried out an exhaustive data aggregation of all the available advertising expenditure through the various media channels. Then the Future Foundation built an econometric model which was tested against the actual history of spend. As can be seen from the figure below, the "fit" between the model and actual is good and use a high level of confidence for the Future Foundation ten-year forecast.

Read full article here

To find out more about Hamish, click here

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