The Social Web and Paid Search - Can It Work?

We all know that there are millions of examples out there for social media and SEO to run harmoniously through dewy meadows holding hands and singing Joan Baez songs, but what about their rich and lonely paid search friend? The advent of social networks have promised those of us on the paid search side some way to monetize and mobilize the masses that engage in social media on a daily basis; it just hasn't happened yet.

Sure, I've seen the ads "targeting" people on Facebook, my favorite being this:

Advertisers are promised a hugely relevant sample to advertise to, and yet their efforts get them what you see above. Simply, this translates into a really poor CTR. Bob Gilbreath blogged about his recent experience with Facebook advertising, which got him a whopping 0.2% (read 12 people out of 71023 who saw the ad) of CTR for a supposedly highly-targeted audience. Is it any wonder that paid SEMs are shying away from advertising on social networks?

I do believe that there's a light on the horizon though. As we become more sophisticated and willing to try new things, platforms are being challenged to think of new ways to reel advertisers in. The easiest way to do this is an auction system; we're used to it, we know it, and it doesn't take a huge learning curve to adapt to it. Integrating this with social media platforms in a content-style platform is going to be wonderful. Hold on... doesn't this already exist? Yes, it absolutely does. The problem (and the soon-to-come solution) is targeting. Platforms need to get their targeting sorted out, and people need to become educated about the thin line between targeted advertising and invasion of privacy. The best example I've seen for this so far has actually been ThinCloud's Twitter for iPhone platform, which regularly serves me up ads related to Mac products, external hard drives and other applications that can increase my Mac-loving (sorry for the awful Superbad pun). I'm more likely to click on it because they've made it extremely targeted. Why can't Facebook, which promises that, deliver? I guess everything is on scale, but I'm hoping that the next year brings about a change in the way people think about behavioral targeting. It's the next logical step.