• by Tameka Kee , May 6, 2008

Advertisers are slated to spend roughly $1.6 billion on social media advertising in 2008, according to eMarketer, including buys on stand-alone sites like Facebook, portal-hosted hubs like MSN Live Spaces and their own white-label, branded communities.

And as the roster of technology and service providers offering the platforms, analytics and guidance to facilitate this spending continues to expand, relative veterans like San Francisco-based PopularMedia are revamping their existing products to keep up with the pace.

PopularMedia has launched a new Social Media Marketing Suite, which combines a number of the company's most heavily used social and viral marketing tools into one interface. The suite includes Conversation Engine, which allows marketers to create branded properties and campaigns, and Social Media Insights, which enables them to track user actions (like image and content-sharing) across them.

Advertisers also have access to the Contact Importer API--which when placed on a Web site, lets visitors import contact info from multiple address books, including Yahoo, AOL and LinkedIn.

Clients--including Omaha Steaks, ShoeBuy and Sephora--have already used PopularMedia's applications to launch and maintain avatar- and social network-based campaigns, as well as viral promotions. According to Jim Calhoun, CEO of PopularMedia, the company's foundation on predictive analytics adds a quantitative, concrete aspect to viral marketing--which by its nature is unpredictable.

"We figure out the math behind virality," Calhoun said. "We can look at all the factors that influence someone to share something, and then methodically test and measure to make predictions about what's able to scale up."

Advertisers launching campaigns with the Social Media Marketing Suite can test multiple factors of a given promotion, from the calls-to-action, to the imaging, to the message copy, and quickly evaluate which components are most successful--or not. "There are certain challenges to predicting and quantifying virality when it comes to brands," Calhoun said. "But with our tools you can witness just 100 sharing events and tell with great confidence which piece of a campaign is going to do well and what you need to retool."

Calhoun said that PopularMedia typically works directly with brands--offering the suite on a monthly subscription basis, with additional fees for creative or database management work. But the company functions equally well as an agency partner, as it has unveiled a number of tools that interact with the shops' in-house database and traffic platforms. "Agencies know best when it comes to a client's overall strategy and the development of a viral campaign," Calhoun said. "But as a partner, we can help reduce the risk of a dud execution."