• by Phil Leggiere , July 20, 2006

MySpace and YouTube may be getting all the buzz, but there’s more to social media than youth culture and lifestyle communities. Take ITToolbox, a community of nearly a million IT professionals who share information and insights on new information technology and related issues via more than 700 discussion groups, blogs, and wikis. It’s also designed as a uniquely advertiser-friendly platform for reaching enterprise technology-buying decision makers.

In addition to content targeting, the site provides advertisers with a proprietary context-matching machine engine, enabling them to match keywords to ongoing user-generated content throughout the network. The site also opens up a wide array of sponsored content opportunities. Among the blue-chip IT business-to-business advertisers it currently boasts are Dell, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Hewlett-Packard.

“One of the things our advertisers have come to appreciate about social media as opposed to other editorial IT technology business portals like Ziff Davis properties, for instance, is that in a professional community of practice there’s an intense focus on real-world IT issues and hands-on content that’s far more granular and detailed than articles in a tech publication tend to be,” says ITToolbox founder and CEO Dan Morrison. “That gives advertisers a big edge in finding fresh and rich content targeting opportunities.”