Asked about how social media informs media buys, Ogilvy's Bell said advertising adjacent to content via blog networks like Federated Media and BlogAds tends to perform from three to 10 times better than ordinary banner ads. He pointed in particular to a company called 33 Across that's mapping the social graph--the connections among people online--to help marketers "layer in advertising in all the right places." "So we can use listening post technology to identify the influencers talking out there. They become our target."

Keep it simple stupid. That's the message from John Bell, managing director, at 360° Digital Influence - Ogilvy, when it comes to selecting partners for social media measurement. With some 120 social monitoring partners out there, he advises selecting two or three vendors that have good reputations and one 'wild card." They all do the same basic things: collecting data, rating and sorting, and reporting. That third step should be simple--not a voluminous report but a one-pager he can take to the C-Suite. The last step--insights and action--is where the brand comes in and human judgment is key. "Tools can't …

When it comes to choosing a social media monitoring tool, Pepper Evans Roukas, Director, Content and Community development, at American Express, discussed the company's current RFP process stemming from the realization this year that the financial giant "needed to start engaging with social media in a much more broad-based way." The first round of the RFP for a social listening tool led to AmEx getting buried with 75-page presentations from vendors. In narrowed down the field to a group of candidates providing product demos and allowing different stakeholders within AmEx to test monitoring tools. Roukas said she also gave …

Craig Engler, SVP, General Manager, SCI FI Digital, explained that you have to tackle negative comments or concerns head on. When the Sci Fi channel announced it would change its name to SyFy, it provoked a backlash among fans who he says mistakenly perceived it as the network trying to disassociate itself from geeks. (Don't alienate your core audience). Engler recently went out on to sites like Twitter and Facebook to explain the reason for the change--essentially to optimize for search since sci fi is a common term but no one else is using SyFy, so the latter will come …