Founder and CEO Marc Benioff outlined a simple social vision in his opening keynote that ties corporate success to the ability to connect with consumers.

“We were born cloud, but today we’re reborn social,” thundered Benioff.

He noted that customers are far outpacing businesses in adopting social technologies.

“Our customers and employees are being social,” he said. “What about our companies? Are our enterprises social? Am I doing enough to listen to customers and employees? It’s more important to listen than ever before.”

How important?

“We’ve seen Mubarak fall, we’ve seen Gadhafi fall,” he pronounced. “When will we see the first corporate CEO fall for the same reasons, because his or her customers are rising up or because they’re not listening to their employees?”

Many hailed Benioff’s speech as the start of a revolution in how businesses operate, with Salesforce.com as the social enterprise operating system.

One such convert was Susan Scrupski, the founder of the Social Business Council, who blogged about doubts she was starting to have about the ability for social to transform a business. Those doubts were shattered by Benioff.

“My crisis of faith ended on the morning of August 31, 2011,” she wrote shortly after Benioff’s keynote, in a blog post titled “A Social Baptism for the Enterprise. Hallelujah and Amen.” “[Benioff] killed it in his opening keynote for Dreamforce 2011 with the messaging I (and many others) have been consistently preaching for the past five years.”

Anyone who says Benioff’s speech wasn’t awesome is just flat out lying (or didn’t see it)! The content was dead on. His tone was upbeat. He worked the room AS HE TALKED, saying hello to at least a dozen people by name, including the CTO of Coca-Cola.

The supporting visual effects were flawless.

While dramatic and filled with pomp and prose, Benioff’s ideas were far from new.

His “vision” is my yesterday, today and tomorrow. He announced his company’s social rebirth in 2011 as if it were 2007 and the social enterprise movement was just starting. Meanwhile, far away from San Francisco, many of the largest corporations in the world, with whom I work and speak to regularly, are leaving social adolescence behind.

Even his comment about the Egyptian uprising was almost verbatim of what I said at my SXSW panel last year, “How Brands Respond to Facebook Attacks.”

Despite being somewhat short on new ideas, Benioff’s keynote was indeed a tipping point. It was a defining moment, as the most successful and philanthropic person in business software in the last decade warmed up for Metallica by confirming and validating the work we’ve done since 2007 that social will impact the enterprise in a big way. And just like he ushered in a new era of computing (cloud versus on premise), he has ushered in a new era of connecting.

It’s an era where customers, vendors and partners are no longer anonymous segments that you “source,” “manage” and “market to.” They are people. People you connect with. Talk to. Advocate for. Listen to. And if you’re lucky, they sell for you, solve problems for you, defend you, listen to you and build your business for you, one conversation at a time, while you sleep.

What another Mark (Facebook’s Zuckerberg) calls “social design,” Benioff now calls “Social Enterprise” — a term many in the industry have been using for years, and which still means many different things to many different people.

It’s been used since at least 2008, to be exact. Jeffrey Dachis, the co-founder of Razorfish, used the term in a headline to launch his company in April of that year — “Austin Ventures Announces Partnership With Jeffrey Dachis to Create Social Enterprise.”

“I believe there is enormous opportunity in helping companies devise and implement a strategy to engage their constituents in a meaningful dialog throughout the enterprise,” Dachis wrote three years ago. “As companies begin to see the benefits of utilizing ‘social’ technology to engage their customers, employees, suppliers, shareholders, and communities in an active and transparent dialog, they will need a trusted partner to help them navigate the opportunities.”

In a 2007 interview with Inside Facebook, Clara Shih, who wrote the book “The Facebook Era” while she was employed by Salesforce, stated, “The next generation of CRM won’t be about software. It will be about relationships, and social networking sites by design are 100 percent about relationships.”

This is exactly what Benioff outlined at Dreamforce (four years later!). We were a software company (“cloud”). We are now a relationship company (“social”). If Clara had stayed at Salesforce, maybe Benioff’s vision would have become a reality years ago.

Much of my focus at Buddy Media over the past four years has been building software that many of the world’s largest brands use to help them connect to their consumers, partners and employees. I’ve been the direct beneficiary of exactly what Benioff and Salesforce.com is now trying to plug in to — pent-up demand from very large businesses that want technology to let them directly connect with their customers and fans, and engage them at scale.

Fueled by $90 million in funding and a team of software engineers that have grown up using social tools like chat, IM, text, Facebook and LinkedIn as their primary communication modes both at home and at work, we have posted 300 percent annual revenue growth by building easy-to-use but powerful enterprise social software. We went from 40 people a year ago to 200 today living Benioff’s dream.

In a blog post after our last round of financing, I wrote about the exact shift Benioff highlighted at Dreamforce: “We are in the midst of a massive shift online from a search and intent-based world to a social, people-based world. The last three years were about the consumer side of social platforms, as we watched Facebook, Zynga and Twitter grow exponentially. The next three years will about the enterprise side of social, and how companies engage and grow their businesses by tapping into these massive platforms.”

The record is now clear. All legacy software companies missed the first four years of the social wave and are trying to play catch up. They continued to focus on business problems — sales force and marketing automation, HR management, financial compliance, expense management, content management, analytics and CRM systems. They ignored most of what happened outside the walls of the company, with customer actions and reactions, thoughts and wants, needs and desires at the top of that list.

Saleforce.com started its effort last week to move from software systems to human systems. My bet is that the company gets there. But most software companies will not.

In the advertising and communications space, which I am most familiar with, companies don’t just want to shout. One-way marketing and blasting of messages is no longer the only tool in their box. They want to listen, engage, learn and communicate. They yearn to be more human, even though humanity and corporate America has a long history of mutual exclusivity.

This means that we have had to put people first, and then build features the businesses need, not the other way around. Consumers don’t care about work-flow, permissions, analytics, auditing, compliance and security features. Businesses do.

Burberry is a prime example, highlighted at Dreamforce, of a company that transformed itself, evolving its 155-year-old British luxury brand into a connected organization. (For an idea of how far they needed to go, one of the only people I knew who wore Burberry growing up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., was my grandmother, Betty Myerberg, who swore by their scarves. Burberry was synonymous with British, plaid and boring, far from where they are today. I now often see lines to get in outside their store on Columbus Avenue in New York.)

Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts gave advice to skeptical CEOs at Dreamforce, saying “you have to create a social enterprise today, you have to be totally connected with everyone who touches your brand. If you don’t do that, I don’t know what your business model is in five years.”

The irony here is that Burberry in many ways “got” social long before Salesforce. Did you know that the company has more than eight million fans on Facebook, more than four times the largest fashion magazine’s Facebook page (Vogue). Vogue no longer controls Burberry’s access to people.

Burberry’s stock price has increased in lockstep with its social investments in the last two years, rising close to threefold in the time period. Social media fluency is a leading indicator for stock price today.

In the future, all businesses will reorganize around people, as failure to connect is not an option. It’s a corporate death sentence.

Much of my next year will be spent with our customers, talking about how they can put people at the center of their business. Companies have always had their own social networks of customers, potential customers, friends of customers, partners, vendors, employees and more. The difference today is that tools and strategies now exist to create a virtual representation of these graphs, to uncover them and enlighten them, much like Facebook has done with each of our real-life social graphs.

It’s the ability to efficiently increase shareholder value — the ultimate ROI! — that makes me so excited about the next phase of social media, social marketing, the social enterprise or whatever you want to call it.

On behalf of Buddy Media, Dachis Group and other social enterprise leaders, I wanted to be one of the first to welcome Marc and his company, the self-proclaimed social media baby, to the social revolution. While you’re new to the party, I have no doubt that you will help companies move further and faster along the social adoption curve and have a long and prosperous social life ahead.

Thank you for bringing much-needed attention to our space, and together we can help companies engage in a two-way dialogue, wherever their customers live, work and play online.

Michael is currently Chairman and CEO of Buddy Media, Inc., a New York-based company whose social enterprise software is used by eight out of the top 10 global advertisers.

As of today, Involver says it’s helping to run 600,000 Facebook fan pages. Beck said in an interview that he had “tremendous respect” for Involver’s founding team but thought he would be able to “add immediate value with my network and contacts in the industry.”

Involver competitors include Buddy Media, Wildfire Interactive, Vitrue and Context Optional.

Here’s the full release:

INVOLVER HIRES ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE VETERAN DON BECK AS NEW PRESIDENT &
CEO

Top SaaS executive will lead the social marketing company into an era of high growth and scale.

SAN FRANCISCO (September 6, 2011) — Involver, Inc. announced Don Beck as the company’s new CEO today. Mr. Beck has a 30-year career of success in enterprise-level software sales and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) sales at IBM, J. D. Edwards, Adobe and Postini. He now turns his expertise to the social marketing sector, where he will lead Involver’s push to the leadership position in their category.

Company co-founder and former CEO Rahim Fazal will continue as Chairman of the Board, and as Involver’s Chief Strategist. “We’re at an inflection point,” said Fazal. “We’ve seen massive revenue growth and customer acquisition over the past six
months, and we’re bringing on the perfect leader to help us ramp even faster.”

See Rahim’s blog post selecting Don: http://inv.lv/qYCSah

Don drove Postini’s sales growth and leadership, culminating in its sale to Google in 2007; and led Adobe’s North American dominance as VP of Sales, driving partnerships, M&A, and managing the enterprise sales organization.

Involver has grown 400% during the past six months. Over 500,000 fan pages run Involver applications, and the company currently adds 3000 new customers every day. To accept the Involver CEO position, Beck leaves his position as SVP & GM of Worldwide Field Operations at Webroot Software, a global Internet security provider.

“Involver is a hot company on the brink of greatness,” said Beck. “My experience helping organizations on similar trajectories will help us accelerate our growth even faster. The social media landscape is the perfect place to build this kind of company – quickly – and our immediate focus will be delivering even more value to customers, as we grow into a market leadership position.”

Involver makes software applications and a management platform that use the company’s proprietary social markup language, Involver SML™. The first language of its kind in the world, SML allows businesses and creative agencies to customize Facebook and create marketing campaigns across the social web at a fraction of the development costs.

”We are particularly excited about Don because he’ll bring in top talent to help us achieve our goals,” said Fazal. “We’ve got a great track record of hiring elite talent, and Don fits perfectly.” in August, Fazal also successfully recruited software industry veteran Steven Walske to join Involver’s Board of Directors.

“Going to China” is a trend we began to see among start-ups early last year, and it has picked up considerable momentum since then. Given the track record of U.S. Internet companies in China — which could at best be described as “mixed” and, at worst, “disastrous” — one might wonder why today’s upstarts believe they’ve got what it takes to be successful in the world’s largest Internet market. China has an estimated 400 million Internet users today, and will have 750 million by 2015, according to a recent McKinsey & Company study.

From our vantage point, it’s not that American entrepreneurs and CEOs suddenly feel they’ve cracked the code on China. Rather, the Chinese market opportunity has become so large, they simply can’t ignore it. The massive potential rewards of “going to China” now outweigh the massive potential risks — especially now that the U.S. market, with all its recent troubles, is no sure bet itself.

The market potential in China is easy to see when you visit the bustling streets of Shanghai or Beijing. As investors in both China and the U.S., we have our own take on why we think China is rapidly becoming a core strategy for every high-growth Internet company today.

• Growth for Fortune 100 companies is coming from China, not the U.S. (or Europe). Case in point: Mercedes sold more S-Class sedans in China last year than in the U.S. and Germany combined. Mercedes sales in China grew 60 percent last year versus nine percent in the rest of the world. Even if you own large-cap U.S. equities in your personal portfolio, mutual funds or 401K, those companies’ main revenue growth is likely coming from China — and economic growth in the U.S. is hardly assured at this point.
• Incomes are rising in China while remaining flat in the U.S. The Chinese middle class numbers in the hundreds of millions (100-300 million, depending on your source), with household income rising an estimated 98 percent since 2004, according to Credit Suisse Group. Even the bottom 20 percent of households saw their incomes rise 50 percent in the same time period. Contrast this with the U.S., where household income growth has stagnated, barely keeping pace with the rate of inflation since 1990. This flat-line income stagnation isn’t likely to change anytime soon, especially in today’s challenging economic climate.
• The Chinese have money, and they’re spending it. Chinese consumers buy an estimated 12 percent of the world’s luxury goods, growing at a 30 percent clip per year, according to Barclays Capital. Spend a day in Shanghai, Beijing or Hong Kong and you’ll be blown away at the breadth of luxury stores in major downtown areas — and the number of shoppers crowding the shops.

So what does this mean for U.S. Internet companies? It means the same thing it does for Mercedes, Apple or P&G — you simply can’t ignore China anymore.

To date, most success stories among U.S. tech companies in China are enterprise or mobile companies in the Fortune 1000 — HP, Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, etc. Each of these companies has built a $1B-plus business in China, but it took them decades to do so, with many speed bumps along the way.

We can’t argue with the dismal results of most U.S. Internet companies thus far in China — first-generation Internet companies like Amazon, eBay, Yahoo and Google have largely failed in China, and newcomers like Facebook and Twitter have been hampered due to strict Chinese government regulations. But we can highlight a few data points that suggest smart U.S. companies can and will attain success in China in the next five to 10 years.

• Demographics. Internet demographics keep getting better in China. Robin Li, founder and CEO of Baidu, spoke at our 10th anniversary event in Shanghai last November. He pointed out that when he launched Baidu in 1999, there were fewer than 30 million Internet users in China, and the total Internet ad market was worth less than $50 million. Today, Baidu sports a $50 billion market cap and Robin is a billionaire. Today there are more than 400 million Internet users in China. Combine this audience size with the rising incomes mentioned above, and you just can’t get a better audience for an Internet company.

• Market share. More than 70 percent of the world’s virtual goods sales in 2010 occurred in the Asia/Pacific region. It’s no wonder why Tencent, which pioneered the virtual goods market now being replicated by Zynga, generates more than $4 billion in annual revenue from gaming and virtual goods, and sports a $45 billion market capitalization. China’s Internet advertising market is growing at an estimated 50 percent or more per year.
• Platform diversity. In the U.S., Facebook is the go-to outlet for social marketing, accounting for more than 80 percent of the market (though it will be interesting to see if Google+ makes a dent in this over the next 12 months). In China, there are social platforms you’ve never heard of that each have hundreds of millions of users. Sina Weibo (think “China’s Twitter”) has more than 140 million users, more than 50 million monthly actives, and is adding more than 10 million new users per month. YY has millions of users, many of whom spend hours per day on the platform. Last year, YY users consumed more Internet voice minutes than Skype. (Disclosure: Our firm, GGV Capital, is an investor in YY.)

In recent months, several U.S. Internet companies have made their move on China. Zynga recently announced a partnership with Tencent to launch its games in China. Earlier in the year, Groupon entered China through an investment into local group-buying site GaoPeng.com. Both of these companies are going after China a mere two to three years after launching in the U.S. — an unheard-of undertaking just a few short years ago.

Our bet is there will be hundreds more U.S. Internet companies talking about China in the boardroom over the next two years. We’d wager more than 90 percent of high-profile American Internet companies will spend a lot of time, money, and energy to enter China — either on their own or via local partnerships. Many will fail to catch on with Chinese consumers. But for the relatively small percentage of companies that succeed, China will bring massively outsized returns. Internet companies that win the hearts and minds of Chinese consumers are the companies to bet on for long-term growth.

Jeff Richards (Menlo Park) and Jenny Lee (Shanghai) are Partners at GGV Capital, a $1 billion venture capital firm investing in the U.S. and China since 2000. Representative GGV investments include Alibaba Group, Pandora Media, YY, Buddy Media, Tudou, SuccessFactors, Square, and 21ViaNet.

That’s the valuation sources say the company earned in its most recent $54 million financing round. New investor Insight Venture Partners put money into the company, along with earlier investors Institutional Venture Partners, Bay Partners and GGV Capital, which led the round.

None of the money will go to employees or early investors, says Buddy Media CEO Mike Lazerow; instead it will be used to fuel expansion in Europe and to double the size of the company’s staff. The New York-based company has now raised more than $90 million, including a $28 million round last fall.

Buddy Media’s services aren’t exclusively for Facebook — advertisers can use them for Twitter as well, and as Google expands its social efforts, there will likely be room for Buddy there, too. But it is primarily in the Facebook business, via software it sells to brands which helps them navigate through the social network, which usually includes purchasing ads from Facebook, too.

That linkage (note that Kevin Colleran, Facebook’s original ad guy, is now on Buddy’s advisory board) means that many assume Facebook will one day end up buying Buddy. But I asked Lazerow about that last spring, and he said he had no interest in the idea– as it turns out, he was likely deep into the fund-raising process at that point.

And he says he still has no intention of selling anytime soon: “We feel like we can be a very large independent business, so why not scale the business today and build it up?”

Very long press release:

Buddy Media Announces $54M in Series D Funding From Leading Late-Stage Investors

Social Media Management Software Company Secures Growth Capital to Fuel Continued Rapid Expansion

New York, NY – August 15, 2011 – Buddy Media, the social media management software of choice for eight of the world’s top 10 global advertisers, today announced that it has raised $54 million in Series D funding from a group of leading late-stage investors.

The capital will be used to more than double its product, sales and support staff in the next year as well as fund additional global offices and acquisitions.

Current Buddy Media investors GGV Capital, Institutional Venture Partners and Bay Partners, as well as new investor Insight Venture Partners participated in the round. GGV partner, Jeff Richards, led the round and has joined the Buddy Media Board of Directors.

The investors each bring a wealth of knowledge and proven success to Buddy Media. GGV’s portfolio includes household names such as Pandora, SuccessFactors and Alibaba Group. Institutional Venture Partners has funded 300 companies since its inception, including Twitter and Zynga in the social space. Insight Venture Partners has been recognized by Red Herring Magazine as one of the Top Ten venture investors globally. And Bay Partners has had over 250 successful exits (IPOs or $250M+ acquisitions) over 35 years and have been investing around open social graph APIs since 2007.

“Buddy Media is at the center of the largest two-way communications revolution that the world has ever seen,” said Michael Lazerow, CEO and Founder, Buddy Media. “Our new funding ensures we have the resources necessary to accelerate the growth of our large, fast-growing software business. I am truly ecstatic to be working with such an amazing group of investors, and believe it’s a testament to our success thus far.”

The latest investment comes on the heels of massive growth and expansion for Buddy Media, including the following milestones:

· The company has added close to 200 new customers in 2011, including some of the world’s most recognizable global brands, retailers and media companies such as Ford Motor Company, Hanes, ESPN, Hearst Corporation, and Virgin Mobile USA.

· The company’s revenue has more than doubled since the end of 2010.

· The company has maintained a net promoter score of 75 in 2011.

· Employee headcount has grown from 40 employees in 2009 to almost 200, with continued massive hiring plans for 2011 and beyond.

· The company acquired social commerce and analytics leader Spinback in May 2011 and plans to complete its integration and roll out this month.

· The company opened its European Headquarters in London last month and hired Luca Benini, a senior executive from Comscore, as Managing Director, Europe.

· The company won the TechCrunch “Crunchie” Award for Best Enterprise application in January 2011.

· CEO and Founder Michael Lazerow was named New York Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in June 2011.

· The company recently hired Dennis Morgan as Chief Financial Officer. While at Yahoo!, Morgan led corporate finance efforts for more than $5 billion in acquisitions and business development deals .

· WPP, the world’s largest communications services group, announced a $5 million investment and global partnership with Buddy Media in October 2010.

Buddy Media’s technology is web-based (SaaS) software that provides companies global scale, secure architecture and straightforward administrative tools to connect with their current and future customers using the power of social media.

“Social media is now embedded in every aspect of the customer journey — from ratings and reviews to ‘like’ buttons to tweets. The opportunity for interactive marketing has evolved from building individual social applications to using social media to enhance a wide variety of marketing channels…” wrote Sean Corcoran in the April 2011 report by Forrester Research Inc., “Embedding Social Media Into The Marketing Mix.”

With the exponential growth of Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites, Buddy Media’s new investors understand that the largest businesses in the world need powerful software to market globally.

“Buddy Media has a proven management team, sustained revenue growth and a massive market opportunity. The company is the market leader in a category that sits at the intersection of social media and software-as-a-service (SaaS), two of the largest and fastest growing markets in the technology industry,” said GGV’s Jeff Richards. “We are very excited to continue to support the company’s rapid expansion in the US and globally. Buddy Media has more than proved itself in terms of building the best team and product in the business. The numbers speak for themselves and I can’t be more excited to work with the entire team.”

“I have known the Buddy Media team for more than two years and have been very impressed with their ability to build innovative products that far surpass those offered by others,” said Insight partner Deven Parekh, who will be a Buddy Media board observer. “And the company has out marketed all others while providing stellar customer service. Buddy Media has what it takes to be a massive business.”

In conjunction with the announcement, Buddy Media has also announced that Kevin Colleran has joined its board of advisors and Michael Kassan has been named special advisor to CEO Michael Lazerow. Colleran previously served as Facebook’s first advertising sales executive, and was the company’s longest tenured employee outside of founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Kassan is an internationally recognized business strategist, and currently serves as Chairman and CEO of Medialink, LLC, the leading advisory and business development firm.

Colleran, who has worked at Facebook longer than anyone except Mark Zuckerberg, said he did not have immediate plans post-Facebook besides taking time off and traveling.

Colleran added that he will remain involved in the industry, with advisory roles at Causes, My Basis and Buddy Media. And for good measure, “I also hope to eventually do some additional angel investing as well as potentially some consulting, public speaking, and non-profit work,” he said.

“My journey at Facebook has been incredible and I am very grateful for Mark, Sheryl [Sandberg], and the rest of the team for giving me such an amazing opportunity,” Colleran said in an email. “I take a lot of pride in having been Facebook’s most tenured employee (after Mark) as well as the first member of Facebook’s advertising sales team.”

A spokesperson for Facebook said today, “Kevin played an instrumental role in building Facebook’s advertising business from the ground up. We’re sad to see him go and wish him all the best.”

Facebook’s ad sales team is now led by Carolyn Everson, who replaced long-time VP of Global Sales Mike Murphy. Meanwhile, Colleran’s title is “global sales lead.”

Colleran’s tenacity as a salesperson was detailed in David Kirkpatrick’s book The Facebook Effect, which described him as “a gung-ho cold-caller who could get in almost any door.”

Kirkpatrick reported that Colleran’s first big ad deal at Facebook was a user-acquisition buy by Party Poker, which brought in $60,000 per month (but was dropped due to online gambling regulations). Colleran also led efforts to create sponsored Facebook groups, which eventually became Facebook Pages. An early promotion that Colleran put together targeted Crest White Strips to college kids by offering them Matthew McConaughey movie tickets and the chance to win a concert at their school if they became members of a sponsored group.

Other significant recent or planned Facebook employee departures include VP of Growth, Mobile and International Chamath Palihapitiya and VP of Technical Operations Jonathan Heiliger.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

But before we get to that, this seems like a good time to ask Buddy Media CEO Mike Lazerow about the loud chatter that he’s agreed to sell his company to Facebook.

Not true, says Lazerow. “It’s not happening.”

You can see why the rumor mill likes the idea, though. Buddy Media is in many ways an extension of Facebook: It charges companies thousands of dollars a month to help them set up and manage their presence on the social network, which usually includes purchasing ads from Facebook, too.

So if and when Buddy does sell, Facebook would be the logical acquirer. But Lazerow, who raised $38 million to date, (including a $28 million round last fall), says he’s not on the market.

“People who are selling today are selling because they’ve decided they need a bigger partner in order to compete,” he says, and here he’s likely talking about companies like Context Optional, which was just acquired by Efficient Frontier. “If you can compete, now’s not the time to sell.”

Okay. Back to Spinback: The five-man company, which formed last year and didn’t open for business until last fall, helps online retailers track the flow of traffic from their sites to Facebook and back again.

So, for instance, if you told your Facebook pals that you liked this t-shirt from BustedTees, Spinback could tell you what happened next: How many of your pals looked at, liked or shared your link, and if any of them ended up coming back to the site to buy one.

There are lots of practical application for retailers alone. But you can also see how that tracking would be useful for people who aren’t selling anything online–like many of Buddy Media’s brand advertisers.

Lazerow says Buddy will eventually integrate Spinback’s team and technology into Buddy’s main offering, but for now CEO Andrew Ferenci and his group will operate as a free-standing team within their new employer.

Spinback from Spinback on Vimeo.

The profile is good but the cover art is just freaky.

Amidst the heaping serving of anecdotes of Sandberg’s prolific abilities to charm and impress people (she cried at work in front of Mark Zuckerberg! She helped her new head of sales decide what to wear!), there’s also some good stuff on Facebook’s current operations:

• Facebook, led by Sandberg, is dedicated to keeping its employee count as low as it can, in order to avoid the “innovation-killing bureaucracy” that has plagued other tech companies (a.k.a. her former employer Google). Sandberg is overjoyed by examples of smaller teams doing more work.
• The FTC will “within weeks decide that Facebook’s privacy policies were unfair and deceptive, and Facebook will agree to undergo ‘periodic privacy audits.’”
• Buddy Media CEO Michael Lazerow said Facebook’s largest advertisers will this year spend more than $100 million each.

Since Facebook in China is one of the topics I’m more interested these days, I’ll excerpt the meat of that portion:

And then there’s China. Facebook has explored creating a joint venture with Chinese Internet companies such as search engine Baidu (BIDU) to operate a division of the social network in China that complies with local censorship and filtering requirements. The company maintains that no decision has been made. Sandberg says the subject, like countless interpersonal relationships on Facebook, is complicated. “There are compromises on not being in China, and there are compromises on being in China. It’s not clear to me which one is bigger,” she says.

Three people familiar with these internal deliberations say that Sandberg and Zuckerberg fundamentally disagree on the issue. Zuckerberg believes that Facebook can be an agent of change in China, as it has been in countries such as Egypt and Tunisia. Sandberg, a veteran of Google’s expensive misadventures in the world’s most populous country, is wary about the compromises Facebook would have to make to do business there.

Sandberg won’t address whether there’s friction over the topic, but she says disagreements in her partnership with Zuckerberg are common and healthy, and that the CEO gets to make the final call. For his part, Zuckerberg insists that he is taking the long view and that nothing is settled. “We have a pretty long-term perspective on this,” he says. “Given our track record so far, I have confidence that we have a good shot at winning whenever it makes sense for us to enter. But we need to figure out what that is going to look like.”

Next up: A New Yorker story by Ken Auletta about women in technology is set to prominently feature Sandberg.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Online performance marketing firm Efficient Frontier is acquiring San Francisco-based social marketing software and services start-up Context Optional, the company said.

While terms of the deal were not revealed, sources said the price was $50 million.

The purchase of Context Optional is the first acquisition for Efficient Frontier, which has grown from a start-up that focused solely on search engine marketing to now including display and social media campaigns.

The move is a significant sign, said Efficient Frontier CEO David Karnstedt, that social has become a key part of the advertising ecosystem and an end-to-end solution is important to marketers.

With the purchase, for example, he said advertisers will be able to run Facebook ads all the way through to managing their brand’s fan page and help with both acquisition and retention.

“Our heritage is that we were early in optimizing search engine advertising for clients, so we wanted to expand our efforts exponentially with Context Optional, since social is different than search,” said Karnstedt in an interview yesterday with BoomTown. “We want to help advertisers interested in social media keep engaged and regularly returning customers.”

Context Optional was founded in 2006 and competes with other start-ups, such as Buddy Media, Involver and Vitrue.

Here is the official press release from Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Efficient Frontier:

Efficient Frontier Acquires Context Optional to Create the First Comprehensive Solution for Social Media Marketing

Unites Leading Advertising and Page Management Platforms to Maximize Social Marketing Impact

Sunnyvale, Calif.–May 4, 2011–Efficient Frontier, a leading global performance marketing company, today announced that the company has acquired Context Optional, a leader in enterprise social marketing solutions. The acquisition expands Efficient Frontier’s social media offering which will combine the company’s advertising campaign management and optimization with Context Optional’s page management platform. This marks the first unified solution for managing and optimizing Facebook fan acquisition through to fan retention and engagement. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“We are excited to offer marketers a complete solution for capitalizing on the growing social marketing opportunity across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn,” said David Karnstedt, Efficient Frontier’s CEO. “Social media marketing is more than just the initial contact with the customer and requires both compelling experiences and an ongoing dialog to realize the full potential of the interaction. The acquisition of Context Optional will create a unified platform for marketers to manage all of their social media touch points with brand enthusiasts.”

Efficient Frontier’s platform manages ad campaigns across search, display and social media, enabling customers to acquire audiences across multiple channels and optimize for better results. Context Optional’s Social Marketing Suite of products is an enterprise solution for brands to engage and retain audiences across Facebook and Twitter.

By aligning acquisition and engagement strategies, the combined company will be able to deliver a seamless and measurable user experience by integrating advertising and social marketing content. Brands will be able to more efficiently target audiences based on social engagement insights and continually refine their Facebook application experiences to better match their audiences’ interests. Efficient Frontier will also be able to provide integrated analytics to provide a more complete view of performance including virality.

“Efficient Frontier is a leader in digital marketing and our respective clients are asking us for a comprehensive solution to both acquire and build relationships with their customers,” said Kevin Barenblat, Context Optional’s Co-Founder and CEO. “This combination is recognition that social media is now indeed a powerful marketing channel in which brands are significantly investing. “We’re excited to be the first in the market with an integrated, enterprise solution to enable brands to effectively scale their investment in social.”

The company is “deprecating” FBML as of March 11, meaning it will no longer allow developers to create new FBML apps and non-developers to use Facebook’s simple FBML app for their pages. Rather, they will have to use HTML iFrames.

On one hand, this will encourage more dynamic apps with more consistent experiences across the Web. On the other, change is hard, and this will affect many businesses with pages using Facebook’s free static tools who may now need to find someone to help them create and host an iFrame.

Old FBML pages can stay up and continue to be edited, and many pages don’t use apps at all. But new customizations will require a change of tools.

The change is being welcomed by third-party developer consultants like Wildfire, Involver, Context Optional and Buddy Media. That’s because it means more business for them to help create and host iFrames–and likely more involved apps and pages that include things like analytics and commerce. For a fee, of course. Wildfire, for instance, is offering a free three-month trial of an app that helps business pages mimic what they previously had with FBML.

It’s not clear that all business page admins know about the shift away from FBML. Though Facebook has been forecasting this change since last year, the capacity to use iFrames on pages has been available only for the past month, and many business pages are not particularly actively maintained.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Today, All Things Digital made it onto Ad Age’s Digital A-List, which also includes Groupon, Buddy Media and Virgin America.

BoomTown loves Virgin America’s digital stuff (plus the hip food) .

Actually, Ad Age’s Nat Ives was very nice to us too, nailing what we’re about:

“All Things D has become a particular sort of powerhouse in the overheated space devoted to tech news. It’s part of Dow Jones, so it’s got that gravitas. But it’s got the speed and humor of a blog.”

Yes, quick and funny and very heavy–that pretty much sums up ATD.

You can read it all here.

The annual rite of passage for newly funded ad tech startups is a great opportunity to learn, network and get fired up for an exciting year ahead. Since its launch seven years ago, I have grown to love Advertising Week. It’s a week-long orgy of panels, speeches, parties and networking, networking, networking.

Regardless, there are a few annoying trends that have developed. Here’s your guide, from one industry executive to another, of what to avoid.

1. The “super excited” executive

   Yes, we get it. You like your product. But your excitement isn’t contagious, it’s a bit scary! You’re not the first DSP. You’re not the “leading provider of” fill in the blank. The event isn’t about your product. Assume we don’t really care about your product.

2. Over-multi-tasking.

   If you take the time to leave the office and learn new things and meet more people, keep your phone in your pocket and your computer in your bag. Speak to people. Introduce yourself. Put yourself out there and good things will happen. Avoid the temptation to sit idly as a new partner or client walks right in front of your drooped head, staring at the Twitter feed on your mobile device of choice.

3. Print is Dead

   First, it’s not dead. The experience of reading a magazine is an enjoyable one and is not going away any time soon. Second, this has been the top du jour for a few years now. Move on. Choose a topic or two you’re interested in and try to go deep. One of this year’s most important topics will continue to be social media. A large Facebook contingency will be in town, including Facebook’s COO. Here are just a few of the social media related events: http://www.advertisingweek.com/events.php?searchStr=social

4. Overextending yourself

   Pace yourself. Advertising Week is a marathon. It’s not a sprint. Don’t go too hard during the day as much of the action, activities and networking are at the evening parties. And there are a ton of them. I think of Advertising Week as just another week with a series of events I’ll seek out. Trying to do everything will be counterproductive. And if you have to choose, choose the evening or late-day events.

5. Over-syncing of your social profile

   We all love social media, but some of it love it a bit TOO much. Don’t be that guy or gal that has 18 different apps synced up to your Twitter or Facebook feed, especially during a week when there’s so much going on. It’s just too much noise. You may love Advertising Week. Your followers, fans, friends and others may not.

   Advertising Week has helped further solidify New York as the center of the media and marketing worlds. It’s the one week of the year that the west coasters actually flock in force to New York. Enjoy it. Cherish it. And avoid the mistakes that will ruin it for you and others.

Of course, if you’re interested in what I’m up to, I’ll be speaking at a few events. [Link: http://www.buddymedia.com/blog/buddy-media-at-advertising-week-new-york]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100927/five-annoying-trends-to-avoid-during-advertising-week/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100329/facebook-waves-off-fan-gives-like-a-thumbs-up/ http://allthingsd.com/20100329/facebook-waves-off-fan-gives-like-a-thumbs-up/#comments Mon, 29 Mar 2010 20:50:09 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=17836 Goodbye “fan.” Hello “like.”

That’s the message Facebook is passing along to its advertisers today. In a move that’s both minor and telling, the social network is replacing its “fan” buttons with “like” buttons on ads that direct users to big brands’ “fan pages.”

“Fan pages” are an increasingly big part of Facebook’s business. They’re in many ways a throwback to the branded sites AOL (AOL) set up in its heyday, giving the brands a chance to stake out real estate in the heavily trafficked social network. Brands can set them up for free, but are encouraged to buy Facebook ads promoting the mini-sites.

So what’s up with the verb change?  A couple things:

• “Like” makes a lot more sense to Facebook users than “become a fan of.” Facebook says users already hit the “like” button in other contexts–in status updates and photos, for example–twice as often as they “fan” something.
• Facebook is on a bigger push to add the “like” button throughout the Web as a way of funneling more and more interaction onto its platform. Expect to hear more about this at the the company’s developer conference next month.

For more on why fan/brand pages matter to Facebook and its advertisers, see this interview I conducted last year with Buddy Media’s Mike Lazerow.

Below is a mock-up of what the new “like ads” will look like when the change rolls out (click to enlarge), followed by the guts of the letter Facebook is sending to ad agencies today. Below that is a FAQ sheet the social network is also distributing.



Whenever possible we want to try to give you advance notice on changes that may affect your advertising campaigns or Facebook strategy. I am reaching out today to give you a heads-up on an upcoming change to Facebook. This will go live in a few weeks, so until then, please keep this information confidential.

As part of our ongoing efforts to improve the user experience, increase engagement and promote consistency across Facebook, we are changing the language we use when people connect to your Brand Pages. People will soon connect with your Brand Pages by clicking “Like” rather than “Become a Fan.” People already “Like” their friends’ status updates, photos and links everyday. In fact, people click “Like” almost two times more than they click “Become a Fan” everyday.

“Like” offers a simple, consistent way for people to connect with the things they are interested in. These lighter-weight actions mean people will make more connections across the site, including with your branded Facebook Pages.

I believe this will result in gaining more connections to pages since our research has shown that some users would be more comfortable with the term “Like”. The goal is to get the most user connections so that you can have ongoing conversations in the news feeds of as many users as possible.

The core functionality of Pages will not change. For instance, your Pages will still have distribution into your fans’ News Feed and you can still call the people who “Like” your Page, “Fans”-your Fans are still your Fans.


FBLanguageChange

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100329/facebook-waves-off-fan-gives-like-a-thumbs-up/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091224/what-facebook-privacy-problem-advertisers-yawn/ http://allthingsd.com/20091224/what-facebook-privacy-problem-advertisers-yawn/#comments Thu, 24 Dec 2009 15:39:44 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=14438 Plenty of Web folks–me included–hollered loudly when Facebook overhauled its privacy policy this month. But the Web is made for shouting, so that makes it pretty hard to get a sense of how most people really feel.

For instance: Do advertisers, an increasingly important part of Facebook’s constituency, care about this stuff? I’ve been looking for signs that the network’s changes have made them skittish, a la the Beacon debacle of 2007. But so far, I haven’t seen anything.

That’s because there isn’t anything, says Mike Lazerow.

Lazerow runs Buddy Media, a start-up that makes most of its money helping big companies–from Bud Light to AMD (AMD) to the Twilight movie franchise–create and maintain “fan pages” on Facebook. These companies in turn spend lots of money advertising their pages to Facebook users and are now generating a substantial part of the network’s revenue. And Lazerow says none of the 125 brands he’s working with on Facebook have uttered a peep to him about the privacy changes so far.

“I know for sure that advertisers don’t care,” he tells me in the video interview embedded below.

The caveat here is that Lazerow isn’t a neutral observer: His company is pretty much dependent on advertisers embracing Facebook. Still, if marketers are worried, they’re expressing that very, very quietly.

Our discussion of Facebook’s privacy problem–or lack of a problem–kicks in around the nine-minute market of this clip. We spent the rest of our time talking about Buddy Media’s business, which Facebook more or less kick-started less than a year ago when it allowed brands to create their own fan pages.

To me, the economy tethered to fan pages seems based on a sort of circular logic: Brands are told they should create the pages–which are essentially what we used to call “Web sites”–so that they can advertise the pages on Facebook so they can drive people to use the pages.

But marketers seem to have embraced the idea, which is big news for Facebook, as well as entrepreneurs like Lazerow.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091224/what-facebook-privacy-problem-advertisers-yawn/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090615/boomtown-interviews-arianna-ken-and-eric-about-huffington-post-exec-changes-bam/ http://allthingsd.com/20090615/boomtown-interviews-arianna-ken-and-eric-about-huffington-post-exec-changes-bam/#comments Tue, 16 Jun 2009 01:18:43 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=14544

Apparently, if you want to think about the growth of the Huffington Post as a culinary dish, perhaps today’s replacement of CEO Betsy Morgan with longtime online media powerhouse Eric Hippeau might appear under the Emeril Lagasse cooking cliché: Let’s kick it up a notch!

Both co-founders of the online media site, Arianna Huffington and Kenneth Lerer, said as much in interviews I did with them this afternoon, after news of the change got out–even as they praised Morgan for the strong work she had done in the 18 months she had been in charge.

“The deal is that we simply have been growing so fast that we needed more firepower to accelerate in expanding the site and monetizing it,” said Huffington, who is also editor-in-chief of the Web news site (and pictured above).

“Things are going great, but things could be going even greater,” added Lerer, who is chairman of the Huffington Post, noting that a more experienced exec was needed at this juncture to take the business to the next level.

“Eric is a peer at all the big companies we need to partner and deal with…and right now, while things are difficult in the economy, is the time when you can really build a company and we had to take advantage of that opportunity.”

So, ipso facto, Morgan was out in favor of Hippeau, who was the key player in the $5 million investment in the Huffington Post by SoftBank Capital in 2006.

Hippeau is a director on its small board, which also includes Huffington, Lerer and Oak Investment Partners’ Fred Harman. Morgan will be vacating her board seat.

Oak recently added $25 million to the funding kitty at the Huffington Post, money that Lerer and Huffington said had not been used yet.

But it soon will be, both noted, with the site expanding aggressively into the local arena, investigative news and verticals such as tech.

It is all being done to build on what has been a strong traffic year for the Huffington Post, which claims it has over 21 million unique monthly visitors.

Nielsen Online has pegged that at the lower figure of 8.9 million, but reported that the Huffington Post was one of the fastest-growing, year-over-year news sites.

Despite that, the site still has not been regularly profitable, said Huffington, despite doubling annual revenue–mostly in advertising–to what some estimate to be about $8 million in 2009.



Hippeau (pictured here) has a lot of experience working at a panoply of early online media businesses, including as CEO of Ziff-Davis.

He has also been a longtime Web investor, pushing for SoftBank’s early investment in Yahoo (YHOO), where Hippeau remains a board member.

That should not present a conflict for Yahoo, said Hippeau, which had a short-lived publishing partnership with the Huffington Post.

Hippeau, who has been a managing partner at SoftBank, will become a special partner and adviser to the investment firm. In this capacity, he will continue to work with three start-ups–Buddy Media, BuzzFeed and ThumbPlay.

Hippeau, who is now diving back into an operating role for the first time in almost a decade, said it was hard to pass up the chance to run the New York-based Huffington Post.

“I could not pass such an opportunity, especially with the explosion in the delivery of the news and opinion on the Web,” he said. “This is really the place to build the next really big brand.”

To get to that level, Hippeau said that a lot of things have to happen at the site going forward.

“Clearly we have got to make the revenues commensurate with traffic of the site and size of the opportunity,” he said. “At the same time, we have got to make sure we are very community-focused and using all kinds of new tools to increase engagement.”

Hippeau noted that journalism was changing radically, and “what people want to know is what are people thinking and how can I contribute and we are just at the beginning of this phase.”

Of particular interest to him are real-time data and real-time communications–on sites like Twitter–and the growth of smartphone usage.

“We are getting into a situation in the U.S., where it is so much easier to access all kinds of information and so much more portable,” said Hippeau. “Everyone has talked about convergence for a long time and it is finally here and we are poised to take great advantage of that.”

The moves at the Huffington Post were first reported by paidContent.org.

Huffington appeared onstage at the recent D: All Things Digital conference with Washington Post (WPO) publisher Katharine Weymouth.

Here is a highlights video of the interview I did with them:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090615/boomtown-interviews-arianna-ken-and-eric-about-huffington-post-exec-changes-bam/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081124/citi-still-spending-money-on-marketing-and-facebook-will-get-a-few-pennies/ http://allthingsd.com/20081124/citi-still-spending-money-on-marketing-and-facebook-will-get-a-few-pennies/#comments Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:47:00 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=1360
File under “odd timing”: On the same day that Citigroup makes headlines as the beneficiary of a $300 billion bailout/prop-up, the bank begins a new marketing campaign. But don’t worry, U.S. taxpayers–the bank you’re buying a piece of isn’t blowing much dough on this one.

That’s because it’s a Facebook app campaign, which makes it very difficult for its sponsor to blow much dough, no matter how hard it tries. In this case, Citi is sponsoring a “Magnetic Lyrics” app, a takeoff on  the refrigerator magnet word games favored by vaguely literate folks. In this case you assemble lyric snippets to your favorite songs by either Nickelback or Mary J. Blige.

Don’t like either act? Me either. But presumably lots of people do, and Citi is doing a broad deal with both of them. In any case, what’s relevant here are the economics, which are small scale.

I don’t have specifics, but I assume that Citi and its vendors–Atmosphere BBDO, a digital agency owned by ad behemoth Omnicom (OMC), and Buddy Media, a start-up that specializes in social media campaigns–are spending a modest amount to actually develop the app. I’m guessing it’s under six figures. And Citi will likely pay a small bounty for each user who plays with it–perhaps $1 per user. So far, that’s about $5,400.

And what does Facebook get out of this? Well, Citi (C) will need to buy some ad space to promote the app, so you can tack on a few bucks more to the campaign. But not much–Facebook has had a notoriously hard time convincing advertisers to pay up for its inventory. And it has a lot of inventory.

The takeaway: Assume Citi continues to exist in some form, it’s going to have to continue to spend money on marketing, and most of that will still be on big-blast campaigns like the ones you’re used to seeing on TV. But small, targeted plays like this could be an effective complement. And if you get a lot of marketers investing a lot of money in these kinds of gimmicks, then Facebook has a real income stream, which it could use.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081124/citi-still-spending-money-on-marketing-and-facebook-will-get-a-few-pennies/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081104/optimism-meets-reality-on-the-ground-at-adtech/ http://allthingsd.com/20081104/optimism-meets-reality-on-the-ground-at-adtech/#comments Tue, 04 Nov 2008 17:02:41 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=580 There’s an ongoing debate about how bad the online ad market has become and will get (your choices: less good, bad or very bad). But that isn’t stopping the organizers of ad:tech from putting on their annual, um, advertising and technology show this week.

This should be a good place to gauge the state of the industry, but it’s also a dizzying one: There are a couple hundred booths and dozens of panels to navigate. So MediaMemo asked an ad:tech veteran for a guide: Mike Lazerow, whose Buddy Media specializes in getting big brands to advertise on social networks like Facebook and News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace.

Lazerow’s first suggestion was to catch CNN president Jon Klein’s keynote this morning. But voting lines nixed that idea (suggestion for next time–Brooklyn district 91 needs more voting machines). Other highlights from Lazerow’s itinerary:

Another must-see keynote is the ‘state of the industry’ on Tuesday, moderated by Internet Advertising Bureau chief Randall Rothenberg. I usually stay away from any panel featuring five people with giant titles on the same stage together. But Randall is an uber-sharp strategist and thought-leader and promises to lead a compelling panel discussion that aims to cut through the noise of the digital marketing world.

… By far the most compelling Data panel is Wednesday’s ‘The Future of Measurement–How Do We Define the New Media Currency?’ David Hallerman, a senior analyst at eMarketer, hosts leaders of the major metrics firms, Nielsen Online, Hitwise, comScore, Quantcast and Microsoft’s Analytics and Atlas Institute. The focus of the panel will be how to create universal metrics to gauge the success and determine the pricing of all digital media that Google doesn’t hold a claim to. I encourage the panelists to grab a drink with each other afterward to move closer to common metrics. …

The ad network panel that will be most interesting is Thursday’s late-afternoon session ‘So Many Networks, So Little Time: Analyzing the Digital Network Landscape,’ hosted by David Joseph, head of the interactive entertainment research group at Morgan Stanley.

The real title of the panel should be ‘Online Ad Networks: Why There Are Too Many and Why They Will Be Out of Business Soon.’ While the world wants another ad network as much as I want my third heart surgery, these buy-siders will help sift through the confusion of the already over-crowded ad network space.

… For the most part, avoid all panels that have ‘innovation,’ ‘synergy’ and ‘dispatches from’ in the title. Stick with panels featuring companies that HAVE money (agencies, brands) and not companies that are selling solutions (startups, vendors and the major ad networks and sites). What matters is what the brands and agencies are buying, not what we want to sell them!”

And yes, Lazerow is on a panel himself: “Mobilizing and Leveraging Consumer Insights: Best Practices for the Digital and Social Media Age” kicks off at 2:45 p.m., and he assures me the discussion will be more interesting than the name. See you there.

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