The Muscular Dystrophy (MDA) Annual Labor Day Telethon will be airing Sunday, September 4th from 6pm – Midnight across the country and TargetCast is seeking your help.

TargetCast is asking all of our media partners to help us help this worthy cause by providing PSA media inventory that will help drive awareness and tune-in to the new and exciting MDA Telethon. The following PSA featuring Steven Tyler shows one of the many stars that have partnered with MDA to drive tune-in for this years event including Jennifer Lopez, Randy Jackson, Natalie Morales, Nigel Lythgoe, Nancy O’Dell, and Max Adler.

Breaking from years past, this years show will air for only six hours versus the previous twenty-two and will feature host Nancy O’Dell and guest performers including Celine Dione, Lady Antebellum, Martina McBride and many others in this star packed show.

Please help the MDA and provide PSA airtime and space by contacting Harlan Schwarz at 212-500-6940 or Casey Boyer at 212-500-6970.

Your help is very much appreciated.

As we’ve all heard, Google+ is now up to 25 million visitors after only being in market since June 28^th.  If you can believe it that rate of growth is faster than MySpace, Twitter and even the all mighty Facebook!   If you don’t believe me, check out the chart below:

Does this mean that Google + will one day surpass the popularity of Facebook? That is still left to be answered.  The engagement rates are still not up to par as people are still asking themselves what exactly is Google+ and why it even exits.  So why then is Google+ growing so quickly one might ask? Google has used their existing Gmail base to establish themselves as a true competitor in the social network world and it has worked.

What Google+ now decides to do with its growing user data base and how it will apply to advertisers will be their next big move!   Stay tuned advertising world, this just might change how we buy and use social media!

News broke late last week that Twitter users will begin to see ads in their main stream of tweets from Twitters ad platform.

For the time being, an ad will only appear in the stream if you are already following the account that purchased the ad (but it won’t be too long before ads will appearing wildly and with a scary frequency). The paid-tweets appear at the top of your feed but will gradually get pushed down throughout the day. This brings up a lot of interesting questions about pricing and how much each paid tweet might cost. We are looking to test the platform here at TargetCast so I am hoping we will have some updates about the nuances of the program in the next few weeks.

Twitter also claims the new ads will score double-digital CTR %’s…an interesting claim being that only a few major companies are participating in the initial program. I am, at best, wary of it’s effectiveness for smaller DR-focused clients.

More to come in the next few weeks…

Turntable.fm, a new social media site where participants interact and play music, is growing rapidly. With over 336,000 people joining in the past few weeks, it has proven to be a popular and addictive site among music lovers. The turntable.fm user, represented by a cartoon avatar, can enter one of several virtual DJ rooms and listen to music being played by other users/DJs. Instead of listening, the user can also choose to participate and play their own favorite music from the site’s extensive music database if there is available space on any of the five turntables that are in each room.

The DJ rooms are often titled by the theme of the music being played, for example “Indie While You Work” or “DJ Wooooo’s House/Dance/Electro.” There can be up to 5 DJs in a room, along with several listeners, and as each song is played, people can vote whether the song is “Lame” or “Awesome.” If a person likes a song and votes “Awesome,” their cartoon avatar begins nodding its head to the beat of the song. DJs acquire points for every “Awesome” vote and they can also gain fans.

The founders, Billy Chasen and Seth Goldstein, have been in talks with investors and the site is said to have received $6 to $7 million in funds. The site is licensed to play music through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Although the site does not yet feature advertisements, Turntable.fm has a high level of engagement among its users and could become a valuable space for advertisers. Check it out!

We wrote back in January of Google’s attempt to compete with Groupon and LivingSocial in the lucrative daily deals market (Google Groupon Clone – “Google Offers”).

Yesterday, Google announced that after a successful beta test in Portland, they will continue the beta in NYC and the San Francisco Bay area starting this week.  The service will be available to subscribers who sign-up at google.com/offers or to those who visit the new “Today’s Offer” tab in Google Shopper 2.0 for Android.  Additionally, these “Offers” can be bought, viewed and redeemed all within Google Shopper 2.0 for Android.

The next reported cities on the list for product roll-out are Austin, Boston, Denver, Seattle and Washington D.C.

Read more…

As of July 4th, Google+’s user base was estimated at approximately 1.7 million.  Not too shabby for a site that launched less than two weeks ago;  so thinks Google’s Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, who spoke at the Allen & Company conference in Sun Valley Idaho last week.

Google intends to use the success of the “circles” concept to fuel and shape existing properties like Buzz and Gmail, while helping to innovate new products in the pipeline, where the “assumption” is that over time, “…everything will move over to using the + infrastructure.”

Schmidt also cited the supply/demand difficulties, especially when considering the many who had invitations but were not allowed access, as being among the greatest problems currently facing the service.  But, he continues to say, “we’re reviewing it on Monday“.

This is very interesting. France has officially banned the names of the top two social networking sites, Facebook and Twitter, from being mentioned on radio or television…UNLESS, they are part of a news story. Dating back to a 1992 decree that says, “mentioning services by name is an act of advertising,” France has taken a stand against both of the social giants.

As described by Christine Kelly, a spokesperson for France’s Counseil Superieur de l’Audiovisuel (CSA), “Why give preference to Facebook, which is worth billions of dollars, when there are many other social networks that are struggling for recognition. This would be a distortion of competition. If we allow Facebook and Twitter to be cited on air, it’s opening a Pandora’s Box– other social networks will complain to us saying, ‘why not us?’”

TechCrunch sums this up nicely, “Instead of referring to specific social networking pages, like saying ‘Find us at Facebook.com/Audi’ or follow us on ‘Twitter.com/Pepsi’ brands will have to skirt around the issue, saying things like ‘Find us on social networking sites!,’ or directing viewers to their community pages and hoping that viewers will just pick up on where to go.”

France has a history of trying to regulate language used on air. According to the Toubon Law,  the French government can mandate the use of the French language in official government publications, in all advertisements, and in all broadcast audiovisual programs, with some exceptions (most notably, private non-commercial communications).

Some say the French government is going overboard in terms of restricting “the spread of American culture” which some bloggers attribute to traditional French protectionism, similar to how in 2003, the French banned the use of the word “email” in all government communications and publications.

In all, the true nature of the ban is not clear, but Facebook and Twitter are certainly making their way across the globe. Think about the earned media the two companies get every day, in every advertisement featuring one of their “brand pages.”

You never know, maybe France does support smaller social networks…or better yet, maybe France is launching their own social network (unlikely), where you have to be French to partake. Didn’t Facebook start with the promise of exclusivity?

Search results on Bing are about to become more socially influenced.  The struggle to maintain search share in the US and globally, against a rival the size of Google certainly keeps the MSN search engine on its toes.  Leveraging its partnership with Facebook gives Bing a leg up in many ways, and starting early this week, Bing searchers will begin seeing results which are influenced to some degree by what their Facebook friends “like” or “share”.

In a Bing Community blog post Monday, Yusuf Mehdi, Corporate VP at Microsoft commented that “today, search remains largely driven by facts and links…Research tells us that 90% of people seek advice from family and friends as part of the decision making process. This ‘Friend Effect’ is apparent in most of our decisions…”, but “…historically, search hasn’t incorporated this ‘Friend Effect’.”  Looking to change this apparent flaw in search results, Bing will begin “including personalized search results based on the opinions of friends”, simply by having users first sign into their Facebook accounts.  Tapping into the larger, “Collective IQ” will also help shape search results when “friends don’t have the right expertise or you’re not sure what you’re looking for. Search is better when it’s not just based in math and algorithms, but also infused with the opinions of people.”

Is the world obsessed with Facebook? Thank you to OnlineSchools for this infographic, check it out:

Via: Online Schools

Over the past week, Google execs and Sales representatives alike have been speaking agency to agency touting their most recent SEM development, the +1. Google is finally taking a leap into the “socialsphere” and a shot at taking share away from Facebook. Ultimately, the +1 is Google’s version of a “like” button on Facebook. If you click the +1 and are linked to your friends via the Google Profile network, then your friends will see your Search Results recommendations, or your +1’s.

By introducing this type of technology, advertisers question what impact this will have on targetability – can I now target ads on the Google Display Network to those that +1 a certain topic? How about deliver keyword to those that have a +1 threshold? Lot’s of questions.

Think of it this way- does getting a +1 on your listing drive up your organic ranking? If so, will there be a click fraud issue?

I’m curious to see how this plays out in the future, but I applaud Google’s new addition…for now.