How I Built my Social Media Network with 1M/1M

By guest author and 1M/1M ambassador Javier Hernández

After almost three months collaborating with the One Million by One Million initiative, I can proudly say that reaching entrepreneurs and economic development organizations has been both exciting and promising. Not only because many of them were interested in joining our program or becoming our local partners, but because to they all together have significantly improved my personal network of contacts within the entrepreneurship ecosystem in my country (Spain) and globally.

Today I passed 1,000 new contacts, most of them entrepreneurs and/or influencers who either follow my Twitter account, are one of my LinkedIn connections or are my Facebook friends. How did I do it? Well, it wasn’t that difficult. 1M/1M came up with great resources and tips to make it happen. I will try to share with you all the steps I followed to reach such an astonishing number of new contacts.

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Rob Jewell, Founder and CEO of Spruce Media (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You needed to provide this service.

Rob Jewell: Yes. We had to build a layer of services on top of that to ensure our clients were successful. Our thoughts have always been that as these channels mature, clients tend to want to bring advertising in-house. We’re in the process of handing the reins over, so to speak, to a lot of our advertisers and licensing that platform and letting them manage it on their own.

SM: What is the minimum spending threshold at which you take clients? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Rob Jewell, Founder and CEO of Spruce Media (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: That would be great for the Facebook API. Facebook right now [has] three billion [dollars in advertising revenue] or something?

Rob Jewell: Yes. I think they’re probably four billion.

SM: Four billion. So, how much of that is going through this kind of optimization? How much is going direct?

RJ: I don’t have exact numbers, but from things I hear, at least half of it is going through the ads API companies. The ads API program is fairly new. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Rob Jewell, Founder and CEO of Spruce Media (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: A customer or lead?

Rob Jewell: A lead, someone who has signed up for Living Social’s daily deals newsletter.

SM: So, Living Social decided to go with your media buying team and technology over its own media buying team and technology to buy on Facebook. Would you talk in a more specific way on what it is that you do differently and why is your team or your technology so much better? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Rob Jewell, Founder and CEO of Spruce Media (Part 1)

Most marketers today know that a social medium like Facebook is a powerful advertising tool. But in 2008, when Rob Jewell founded SocialCash, Spruce Media’s predecessor, using social media to market businesses, products, and services had yet to become common practice. Although social advertising is gaining traction, there is still far much too unmonetized advertising inventory out there on the Internet, on mobile, on social, and on the Web in general. There are all sorts of communities out there – not just on Facebook – that have unmonetized ad inventory.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Rob. Let’s start with some context on Spruce Media. Tell us a bit about yourself, about Spruce Media, what you do, what kind of business you’re in, and then we’ll take it from there. >>>

The Effect of Facebook’s IPO

By guest author Daniel Burrus

Facebook’s IPO may well be the biggest and most hyped IPO ever … and for good reason. Many people would like to have bought Google or Apple when they first went public, but they didn’t. Now they’re kicking themselves for it. Unfortunately, you can’t go back and undo the past.

With Facebook’s rapid growth and social media dominance, all the people who regret not making those two moves in the past are going to want to buy Facebook. Additionally, all the people who are excited about social media and see it as a key part of the future are going to want to own part of Facebook, too.  >>>

The Next President Must Have an Integrated Social Media Strategy

2012: Top Trends and Opportunities

New year. Fresh energy. Time to take stock of trends and open problems for 2012. The most notable change this coming year is that Steve Jobs is dead. In death, however, he has become even larger than life, and his legacy will drive this decade’s technology movement for a while at least. One of his key legacies is the marriage of technology and humanities, which I believe will shape the next phase of evolution in the IT industry. I elaborated my vision in Silicon Valley: The Next Decade.

In Top 10 Tech Trends For The Decade, I outlined a set of key movements which are pretty much the driving factors for the time being:

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