Facebook is turning people's impromptu opinions on products and brands into ads it calls Sponsored Stories--and apparently doing very well with it. Now, tech blog network NetShelter is taking the basic idea, adding a new twist, and spreading it well beyond Facebook's walled garden to the wider Web--or at least the 4,500 blogs on which it places ads.
NetShelter's inPowered Stories, released in beta test Tuesday, allows brands to recommend a product story or review--presumably one that reflects well on them--below a related story. In particular, NetShelter, by looking at signals such as Facebook shares and Likes, tweets, and shares on Digg, can determine which stories or reviews are most influential and allow brands to highlight them across NetShelter's network, which reaches 150 million people worldwide.
The idea, says NetShelter CEO Peyman Nilforoush, is that at least with tech products, the opinions of experts holds more sway than the opinions of friends. So a story from one of NetShelter's popular blogs, such as MacRumors.com and 9to5Mac.com, is likely to be more influential in getting people to buy a particular product than merely seeing that a friend on Facebook Liked it. "We realized that tech is a considered purchase category in which it matters what other people think about products," Nilforoush said in an interview. "Expert opinion carries a greater weight."
Advertisers also pay differently for inPowered Stories, which are marked as "Sponsored," from conventional display ads or even Facebook's social ads--only when a story is clicked or shared via Facebook or Twitter. For the beta, at least, they pay $5 every time a story is clicked and read, and another $5 each time the story is shared. Nilforoush says that in initial pilots, inPowered ads had 10 times the aided awareness, six times the brand favorability, and six times the likelihood to recommend as display ads.
NetShelter says it has signed up five Fortune 500 brands for the beta, though it won't identify them. But it's a significant attempt to see if social ads will catch on outside the world's largest social network. If they do, Facebook's signature ad formats may not prove unique for long.
