Collaboration Cast

Recently Prime Visibility (PrimeVisibility.com), a rapidly growing integrated online marketing company specializing in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC), released a study showing which presidential candidate was most preferred by social media sites.

Sites such as bookmarking (digg, del.icio.us), video (YouTube, MetaCafe), widgets, podcasts, image/photo-sharing services (Flickr, Photobucket), social networking (MySpace, Facebook), social knowledge (Yahoo! Answers, Wikipedia), directory submissions (Google Directory, DMOZ) and online reputation management (ORM) were monitored.

Results showed that through Oct 17th Obama was leading 20 of the 43 sites monitored, McCain led three, and both tied in one site.

The two candidates tied on Yahoo, which had over 1.1 billion comments each.

Obama won on Google Blog Search with approximately 227.7 million comments versus 93.2 million for McCain, while Google search produced 201 million page views for Obama versus 141 million for McCain.

In the following video clip, Barack talks about his use of social media and how internet volunteers helped his campaign succeed in many states.

This recent study shows the power of the web and how candidates can no longer discount the need to leverage social media in their campaigns. Tomorrow’s election results could potentially validate if a win in cyberspace could be a good indicator of a true election win.

Recently, Appssavvy, a social media company that connects advertisers with social networks, secured $3.1 million in funding. Appssavvy claims they provide a platform that that lets advertisers launch advertising campaigns on popular social network sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and hi5.

In total they suggest that their platform can help marketers market to 50 million users and not have to worry about dealing with different vendors for multiple social networking platforms.

Some example of the work they have done includes building Facebook applications or helping advertisers sponsor existing applications. Here are a few of their projects:

Kohl’s Back to School Custom Application in Facebook

VO5 Ultimate Flirt Custom Application

Startship Troopers 3 Armies Sponsorship

The 2 Coreys - A&E Mesmo Sponsorship

My Boys - TBS Mesmo Sponsorship

Made of Honor Wedding Book Sponsorship

Funding social media companies even in a down turn market makes sense. Consumers today are spending more and more time on social media sites. Recent studies show how people are now spending more time on social networking sites than on pornography sites, which have been for a long time the second most sought after content on the web. Also, marketers are realizing the value of social media and many plan to reduce their spending on traditional media and focus more on social. As economic times get worse, companies will be looking at spending less and finding ways to reach their target audience at lower costs and social media is a perfect venue for such targeted lower cost marketing investment.

So in my opinion social media marketing spending will continue to grow in a down turn market and Appssavvy one of many companies positioning themselves to be successful in this down turn market.