The Future of Social Media Advertisement - Marketing Update - Episode #228

With the growing demand for more sophisticated, automated, and farther reaching ad services, a number of companies are making serious moves to give these marketers what they want. This weeks marketing round ups will fill you in on what you need to know about upcoming products and changes to existing social networks around mobile and social advertising.

Facebook Prepares to Amp Up Its Ad War With Google With Atlas (http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57569212-93/facebook-prepares-to-amp-up-its-ad-war-with-google-with-atlas/)

The social networking giant, Facebook, is expected to purchase an extensive ad-serving technology known as Atlas, from Microsoft. The advertising platform will be tasked with handling Facebook’s ever growing advertising empire in an effort to overthrow Google as the current king of display advertising. This purchase will allow Facebook to deliver socially powered ads outside of the social network and tap into a much larger market of advertisers.

Twitter Prepping Bigger Ad Play
(http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/twitter-prepping-bigger-ad-play-147209)

With social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn offering ad APIs of their own, Twitter has decided to jump on the display advertisement bandwagon. Twitter will be turning up the heat on its advertising platform by introducing its new ad API this quarter. The product will allow brands to create and run a variety of ads in a more automated and sophisticated manner, like they would on Facebook. Twitter has been busy promoting its ad API to a number of agency execs and social ad firms in preparation for its launch.

Social Authority: A Measure of Twitter Influence
(http://www.seomoz.org/blog/social-authority)

SEOmoz has recently announced the release of "Social Authority," their new metric for determining the influence of Twitter users. Social authority’s metrics are based on the number of retweets a user receives. The metrics give users a number of features that include ordering all active Twitter users by influence, dissecting your social graph, and finding new followers who are most important.

Salesforce Alums Raise $3 Million to Bring Analytics to Stores (http://mashable.com/2013/02/12/nomi/)

It’s no secret that brick and mortar retailers sometimes lack the tools they need to track and nurture their customers like online retailers are able to. Marketers for e-retailers can tap into a number of metrics to ensure their marketing is working. That's why it's pretty cool that a company called Nomi is stepping up to the plate and offering brick and mortar retailers a solution to this problem. Nomi has created a platform designed to "track customers’ movement across online, mobile, and in-store channels." The company was founded by three Salesforce alums in August of 2012, and has raised $3 million in funding from various investors to get the product off the ground.