Federated Media positions WordPress advertising as a more focused alternative to social media buys. The campaigns are content-driven, offering sponsored content curation, sponsored posts and semantic conversation targeting for ads.

Monetizing The Long Tail

Independent publishers on WordPress represent the long tail of Web content. They publish on specific topics for niche audiences. That makes their individual reach small, in terms of raw traffic numbers, but their audiences are highly engaged with particular interests. They're valuable, but they're hard to reach at scale.

Federated Media recently acquired Lijit Networks to improve its targeting of ads to long-tail content. Lijit offers publishers an on-site search box that searches across multiple sites, including blogs, tweets, bookmarks and photos. Publishers can adjust the constraints to include outside content if they want, making Lijit searches a powerful way for visitors to explore topics in more depth. Lijit reports that over 70,000 publishers currently use their service.

In turn, the rich site data gathered by Lijit enables precise and relevant ad targeting, and it has served over 28.3 billion ads so far this year. Lijit's technology, Federated Media's scale and the WordPress.com audience represent a big chunk of high-quality, topically focused Web traffic that major advertisers like AOL, Yahoo! and Google have more trouble monetizing.

This partnership will offer small publishers a way to monetize, and it will give FMP the additional scale of reaching almost 300 million monthly unique visitors to WordPress.com sites.

The State of the Word is Strong

In August, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg gave his annual State of the Word address, in which he reported some strong numbers. Nearly 15% of the world's websites are powered by WordPress. For every 100 new active domains in the U.S., 22 of them run WordPress.

The open-source blogging platform also provides a thriving economy for developers. A survey of over 18,000 WordPress users and developers offers rich insight into the strength of the platform, and it's all available for anyone to peruse.

You can watch Mullenweg's 2011 address here:

WordPress users: would you opt in to this new ad partnership? Let us know in the comments.

Disclosure: Federated Media is ReadWriteWeb's advertising partner.

Check out the Web 2.0 schedule and watch the events live here.

Microsoft started to integrate some Twitter search results with the main Bing search engine a few weeks ago, but these were only from very popular Twitter users. Interestingly, BingTweets will run on its own Bingtweets.com domain, and, as far as we can see, isn't linked to from the main Bing site. For now, it's a completely separate entity, but chances are that Microsoft is already experimenting with other ways to incorporate more Twitter search results into Bing.

This is Federated Media's second Twitter project together with Microsoft. The first was the launch of ExecTweets, a site that allowed users to find, follow, and engage business executives on Twitter.

Not Quite A Fusion of Twitter and Bing

Bingtweets looks like an interesting project, but while its tagline is "Fusing Twitter Trends with Bing Insights," the reality is that it displays a Twitter feed next to Bing's search results and there is no real fusion between the two.

We do like, however, that Microsoft stressed overall trends on Twitter and allows users to quickly get a grasp on what a trending topic is about. After all, Bing's results often display information about current news events like the earthquake in New Zealand today, for example. Breaking these trends down by popular terms, people, places, and products is also quite nice, and we are not aware of any other Twitter search engine that currently does this. We also like the ability to share results directly on Twitter through an oversized form at the top of the page.

Overall, this is an interesting effort, though we are not sure that Bingtweets currently offers enough value to differentiate itself from other Twitter search engines and memetrackers like Twazzup or Tweetmeme.

When a medium has been established for a long time, its ads can become a bit blah! As a Brit who moved to the US, I used to bemoan that TV ads in America were so boring compared to the ones in the UK. Part of the problem was that you could not measure the ROI of creativity. The guys who wrote the big checks could say, "Winning awards, the plaudits of your peers, and a lot of laughs is all very well, but do they drive sales?" The answer, of course, was, "Who the hell knows?"

We have seen the same thing in the Google CPC era, when the whole game was about measurement and analytics. How creative can you get with a text ad?

But when you need to entice users in social media, creativity is so critical. As we heard stories from brands such as Gillette (P&G), American Express, GE, Blackberry, and Intel, a few common themes emerged:

1. Authenticity. You cannot fake it in social media. You will get flamed and exposed, and the campaign will become counter-productive.
2. Risk-taking. You have to take a chance on a campaign. The old tried and true corporate-approved stuff will just bomb.
3. Strategy. You have to have a clear strategy. What problem are you solving, and what big lever are you using to hit that goal?

The Gillette India Story

There were so many great stories, but this one resonated the most. Imagine selling razor blades in a country with a billion plus people and where your blades cost ten times those of the local competition. Gillette's sales had been flat for a decade. After this one particular campaign, its sales grew by 40%. That is massive. The thing to note is that it spent a lot of money on traditional media but used that to spark a debate (about the value of shaving for your sex appeal and career prospects) that was amplified in social media.

Feeling Like the Web 1.0 of 1995

Big money is starting to move into social media. There is recognition that the old ways of selling online -- what some people are calling "tradigital" -- is not working as well anymore. But it is still very experimental. The numbers don't reflect it yet. But many smart and creative people are working out new ways to engage consumers. Some of the resulting campaigns will be dismal, embarrassing failures: this is a high-risk game. But doing nothing would be worse and would leave room for smart competitors to steal market share.

How to Play This If You Are a Web Tech Venture

The overriding message to people who sell tech solutions or websites to advertisers and marketers was that there is no silver bullet. This is the era of the "mashup campaign," using a lot of tools and informed by an overarching strategy. So, if you sell one of those tools, make sure you play nicely in the eco-system. Be a good mixer: open APIs and the rest of it.