Edelman, Newsgator to Create Branded Communities, Conversational Advertising

It's been a really exciting year for Edelman on many fronts, especially when it comes to products (see Storycrafter and Second Life). Today we're launching the last one for the year in conjunction with our newest partner, Newsgator. We've spent a lot of time together over the past several months developing this unique offering and we're confident it will help our clients bridge the shrinking gap between online advertising and conversation.

The Edelman/Newsgator product includes two components:  Hosted Conversations – brand sponsored topic-based communities; and dynamic conversational advertising – embedded community content that lives right inside an ad.

Hosted Conversations

With the explosion in media, particularly in the Long Tail, there is no shortage of information on virtually any topic online. This makes it difficult for the individual to find all of the high quality content in a vertical.

That's where Edelman and Newsgator will come in. Together we will build branded Hosted Conversation sites for our clients that aggregate content hand-picked from news media, blogs and other channels. (Note: these are summaries/links, not full text.) Each site will be hosted by an expert on the topic, and allow visitors to join the discussion by commenting on the host’s posts, and by publishing their own posts on a separate blog. Newsgator's private label RSS platform powers the entire back end but the user won't need to know a thing about feeds.

Conversational Advertising

An important component of this program is how we drive traffic to these topic-based communities. That’s where our dynamic conversational advertising comes in. Using the Edelman/Newsgator product, sponsors will be able to buy topical ads that function as embedded widgets on a site, branded with their product’s logo and topic-specific messaging. The ads will contain continuously updated content from the community; e,g. news, opinion and other topical content, which Web site visitors will be able to read, comment on and rate. They will be far richer, more valuable than traditional static banners.

In addition to the conversational ads, we will bring our full PR resources to bear in promoting these sites across all forms of media.

This entire program is only for Edelman clients through our exclusive partnership with Newsgator. Many people including JB Holston at Newsgator and my Edelman colleagues Rick Murray, Ming Yee and Michael Wiley have worked tirelessly on this deal and we look forward to sharing more with you in 2007 as we bring these sites up!

::LATER: ClickZ has more