With more than 80 million users, LinkedIn has long been the top social network for the business crowd, and has grown quickly as a tool for recruiters and sales teams looking for new leads and connections. But what about brand marketing? Yes, LinkedIn has “Groups,” but they have always driven far less traffic, engagement and brand awareness than Facebook pages or Twitter—and as a result, LinkedIn has always been a something of a second-tier destination for tactical social marketing.

With the recent launch of Company Pages, LinkedIn is trying to change that.

The unique attraction of the new feature, said LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner in a press release, is to take “product and service recommendations to another level, allowing professionals to benefit from the considered perspectives of those whom they trust and relate to the most—the people they know.”

In addition to allowing written recommendations from customers and clients, Company Pages lets marketers post product listings, informative videos and online promotions, and offers targeted advertising capabilities based on users’ geographic locations and titles.

This recommendation aspect, expanding on LinkedIn’s core mission of allowing users to recommend other members, goes a step beyond the concept of “liking” or following a brand and becomes more of an endorsement. A written recommendation for a company’s products requires a significantly greater commitment, can carry more weight, and be a stronger reflection of a brand’s online popularity.

More than 3,700 companies have set up their Company Pages in the week since the program’s launch, including JetBlue, HP, AT&T and Kodak, and B2B companies seem especially excited. We recently chatted with Anna Griffin, VP of global brands and campaigns at Juniper Networks:

This is a brilliant move by LinkedIn to take a job networking opportunity and turn it into a valuable b-to-b recommendation and endorsement. When I think about what this could become…it’s going to make for a really strong recommendation platform, not just an “I Like it” or “I Digg it.”

Social marketers in both the B2B and B2C arenas will certainly test Company Page product recommendations vigorously in hopes of seeing the same viral impact offered by Facebook and Twitter. Whether marketers will see any impact at all, however, is a big question: LinkedIn is not exactly known for overwhelming engagement. And while B2B marketers might see the occasional product recommendation with Company Pages, it’s difficult to imagine seeing any significant impact on the B2C space. (Will anyone be up for recommending 3M Scotch Tape, McDonald’s Happy Meal, or Tide Original with Bleach Alternative on LinkedIn? Doubtful — especially considering they can already “Like” those on Facebook with relative ease and minimum involvement.)

Which leaves us with B2B. Is it possible that the social network’s mostly-business audience will start recommending company products like the Dickens? Sure, it’s possible. The big question is whether these recommendations will actually influence other peoples’ purchase behavior — and if it does, brand marketers may have finally found their “in” with LinkedIn.

The marketer-mom blogger love affair is getting stronger and stronger. Pioneered by companies such as Walmart, with its Elevenmoms program (now called Walmart Moms), marketers have realized that moms who blog can be very powerful allies.

The frenzy reached fever pitch at last month’s BlogHer ’10 conference in New York, which had 2,400 attendees—many of them moms. Brands sponsored special events for female bloggers, gave away merchandise and conducted impromptu surveys and focus groups. Among the activities:

• Pepsico, a lead sponsor, offered the Tropicana Breakfast with an appearance by Bruce Jenner
• Gold’s Gym Manhattan invited all attendees to work out for free during the conference
• Clothing retailer Ralph Lauren hosted an event for selected bloggers to preview “The RL Gang,” a children’s book and online clothing store
• Procter & Gamble’s Tide brand hosted a series of exclusive dinners for bloggers and introduced attendees to a new fabric-care brand, Tide Swash

What benefits do marketers see from creating relationships with moms who blog? Which marketers are doing it right? And how are the recently updated Federal Trade Commission guidelines on disclosure impacting the ways marketers work with mom bloggers? Those are subjects I’m researching for an eMarketer report that’s publishing in October.

According to a Retail Advertising & Marketing Association study conducted in December 2009, 13% of US moms of tweens (ages 8 to 12) maintained their own blog. And more than half (52.2%) said they read blogs.

Although reaching blogging moms seems easy, it’s not. As Jen Drexler, principal at marketing consultancy Just Ask a Woman, wrote in an Adweek column recapping the BlogHer conference: “The blogger universe wants to play with like-minded brands that get it.” There is still a lot that brands need to learn.

Do you market your brand to mom bloggers? Are you a mom blogger who has relationships with brand marketers? I’m seeking interviews and case studies for this report. Please leave a comment or ping me at dwilliamson@emarketer.com.

Image via KelbyCarr.com

Give beleaguered General Motors a few points. Its all-American Chevy brand had a major presence at the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival. In March, the 2011 Chevy Volt electric car and Chevy Cruze sedan were front and center at the Austin, Texas–based confab of cool as the brand tapped mobile media to bond with the tech-savvy, early-adopter attendees. SXSW took place March 11 to 20, its interactive track March 12 to 15.

Challenge: As a super sponsor of SXSW, Chevy used the event as a showcase for the Volt and the Cruze and test bed for mobile marketing. That neither vehicle was available presented a challenge for Chevy. “We recognized that to be effective with a digital, social media audience you can’t just go in and put a logo all over something. That’s not engaging and it wasn’t an automotive event,” said Christopher Barger, General Motors’ director of global social media, in an interview with eMarketer May 20.

Chevy wanted to build awareness among attendees for both the vehicles before the major marketing pushes began, but it didn’t necessarily see SXSW a near-term lead-generating opportunity. It decided to offer experiences that would inspire attendees to associate the brand with cutting-edge cool. (Read more…)

With the 2010 World Cup fast approaching, it’s a good time to reflect on how this event will unfold online, and how much the digital world has changed since the last time soccer’s global superpowers convened four years ago.

Back in June 2006, independently owned YouTube was getting about 100 million video views per month, compared with 6 billion in January 2010. Facebook was a closed network for college and high school students. Twitter did not exist as a public entity. World Cup organizer FIFA did not stream live games, so any streaming happened on P2P or pirate networks. There was only a smattering of post-match highlights on the Web.

Fast forward four years, and we can expect a surfeit of digital activity, starting with the live streams of the matches. In the US, ESPN/ABC and Univision have broadcast rights in English and Spanish, respectively, and those rights extend to the Web. Both entities will be streaming every match live on their digital platforms.

With ESPN, this comes with a catch. The company’s parent, Disney, has been in a stalemate with some ISPs over carriage fees, so ESPN3 (formerly ESPN360.com) is not available on, say, Time Warner Cable. This shuts out tens of millions of potential streaming customers. Univision, on the other hand, has no such restrictions, so anyone willing to stream matches in Spanish will be able to do so.

Both ESPN and Univision will carry the streams for free on an ad-supported basis. In global soccer, that means discreet banner ads that don’t interrupt the flow of the game – great news for fans, not so great news for marketers.

Still, the potential streaming audience in the US is huge. While the stereotype is that most Americans don’t care about soccer, the reality is many do, especially expatriates of foreign Fútbol powerhouses. Out of the 32 teams competing in the tournament, 11 have US-based populations of at least 1 million, according to Census Bureau surveys of ethnicity and ancestry in the US population.

Some of these groups will be more transfixed by the tournament than others. I expect the vast majority of the 30 million Mexican Americans in the US to follow the team’s every move. It’s telling that Mexico played a round of pre-World Cup exhibition games in the US, where it drew sellout crowds in Chicago, Houston, New York and even Charlotte, N.C.

Other nations with large US immigrant populations—Germany, England, Italy, France, the Netherlands—will also create a huge demand for World Cup streaming content. However, the numbers of these nations’ US-based contingents are harder to gauge. The US Census Bureau estimates that 50+ million people in the US self-identify as having German ancestry, but does that mean they’ll all be waving the flag when Germany takes the field? Probably not.

The same could be said for the 27.5 million people of English ancestry, the 17.7 million Italians and the 9.4 million French. These ethnic groups are well-assimilated into the general population, and they don’t identify with the motherland to the extent that other, smaller groups might. That’s not to say there won’t be huge numbers of rabid German, English, Italian and French fans cheering on their teams.

Then there are the Americans. Historically, the World Cup has not sparked the passion of US fans, even when the championship was held in the States in 1994. Then again, the U.S. hasn’t played particularly well in past cups, so a stellar performance this year could ignite a frenzy along the lines of the “miracle on ice” of the 1980 Winter Olympics, when the US defeated arch-rival the USSR to take the gold medal in men’s ice hockey.

Outside the US, the potential streaming audience is essentially as large as the Internet penetration levels of participating countries, plus those of soccer-crazed nations like China. Easily in the billions. However, it should be noted that in most countries, it’s entirely acceptable to stop everything to watch World Cup games on TV. Work comes to a complete standstill, so there’s no need to “sneak a peek” at lunch time the way US employees do during March Madness. In 2006, the World Cup Final drew more than 700 million TV viewers worldwide, compared to an estimated 154 million total viewers for the 2010 Super Bowl.

In Argentina, for instance, the minister of education authorized the country’s schools to broadcast World Cup games to students during the school day. His rationale (as if he needed any) was that watching the games had “pedagogic” value. In the same breath, he admitted that without such a policy, kids would skip school with “total complicity” from their parents.

Even if live streaming isn’t as important to global audiences as it might be to immigrant populations in the US, you can fully expect the global Web to light up with millions of post-game highlight videos and social media updates during the course of the tournament.

FIFA expects 5.5 billion page views on its site alone, up from 4.2 billion during the 2006 World Cup. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Other sports sites with larger audiences, such as ESPN.com, will see much more activity than they do on a regular basis.

So what is the value of all this content? Hard to put a number on it, but a study by Global Web Index—a joint project by Lightspeed Research and Trendstream—estimates that FIFA is “undervaluing online World Cup rights” by bundling them into broadcast deals. The study’s author believes that significant numbers of people around the globe would pay to stream the World Cup and that FIFA is missing an opportunity to squeeze more revenue out of this content.

“This research shows that online football rights for the 2010 World Cup are massively undervalued,” said Tom Smith, Director of Global Web Index. “There is proven appetite for streaming all sports online and more importantly, consumers are increasingly paying for it. There’s a whole new generation of younger consumers, as well as specific markets like China and South Korea where paying for sports online is quickly becoming the norm. This research shows that the days when online sports rights are thrown in as a sweetener with the TV rights may be about to be shown the red card.”

Does this mean that FIFA will charge users for streaming the 2014 World Cup? I can’t imagine it hasn’t crossed their minds.