• GigaOm, Friday, April 11, 2008 12:31 PM

In a memo to employees about the Yahoo saga, AOL CEO Randy Falco underlines the problem facing social networks: "But despite drawing large, engaged audiences, other social networks have not been able to make the experiences relevant to users and marketers alike."

Falco hits the nail on the head: social nets want marketers to foot the bill for content that's specifically tailored to an experience where the user is completely disengaged from marketing messages. Falco thinks that by combining Platform A and Bebo, AOL could fix the problem.. But lumping another company into AOL's portal and then using an ad network, even a highly targeted one, to serve it ads won't solve the social networking question. Someone still needs to come up with a way to make social networks more relevant for advertisers.

It's more than likely going to be a technology solution from a company like ScanScout, whose technology is able to break up, say, a video into tiny segments that it lumps into advertising categories, making sure the piece of content is both advertising-friendly and relevant. Social media sites need technologies like this to extract ad friendly inventory for reticent advertisers.

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