Woot! Uh… I mean… Hoot!

Super popular social media dashboard (and all things Ow.ly) Hootsuite has opened direct ad sales using isocket!

If you want to reach savvy early adopters, social media or community managers, brand managers, or just the general tweet-o-sphere, this is an excellent high impact way to do so.

Hootsuite is displaying a single 125×125 advertisement in the left menu bar of their web app for $3 CPM. You can see the ad when you hover over the left to expand the nav menu.

Check out Hootsuite’s advertising profile and place an order at BuyAds.com!

Speaking of social… are you at BlogWorld Expo in LA right now? Say hi to Hup and Dom! 

We’re happy to announce that AOL Tech, the parent group of TechCrunch, is launching additional properties on isocket and buyads.com!

As you may recall, the uber popular blog TechCrunch was our very first publisher. When AOL bought TechCrunch about a year ago some people questioned what would happen with isocket – but after successfully powering direct ad sales for TechCrunch and showing how much isocket can help, the AOL folks wanted to expand.

First on deck is TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog), a great site covering all things Apple. Check out TUAW’s advertising options over on BuyAds.com. In addition to the leader board and med rec spots they’ve got the popular 125×125 buttons on a weekly and monthly basis. If you are marketing an iOS application or Apple accessory (like iPhone 5 cases!) this would be a great spot.

More AOL Tech properties are on deck, including the popular gaming blog Joystiq. Check in over the next few weeks for more.

Some other great (and even off the wall) pubs have joined recently.

Check out the ad options for:

• Hootsuite – very popular social media management dashboard
• Fashiolista – 1.5M visitors, fashion, style, women
• The Art of Manliness – 1M visitors, all about mens style
• Adverblog – covers digital marketing ideas
• 4shared – Alexa Top 100 property with 95M registered users
• Springwise – entrepreneurship, startups
• All Women Stalk – fashion, beauty, women
• The Poop Report – 10M page views about poop? Yep!

Let’s get one thing straight, all of us here at isocket are huge fans of having our office in Burlingame. I mean, what’s not to love? We’re less than 50 yards from the Burlingame Caltrain station, we have plenty of grass to go walk our dogs in and probably the most important reason of all — we’re within walking distance to the world’s only official PEZ Museum.

Without going into too much more detail, I think that it’s pretty easy to tell that we all love being located in this fairly unknown gem of a startup suburb and apparently some other people are starting to take notice as well. A few weeks ago our founder/CEO John Ramey was interviewed in a newspaper article in the San Jose Mercury that was titled Burlingame becoming new tech hub and it’s entire focus was on the fact that Burlingame has become the cool place to be when it comes to tech startups. If you ask me, I think we started a trend.

In the article John was asked why he thought that Burlingame is such a great place for a tech startup and to my personal surprise he didn’t even mention the PEZ Museum. Instead he thinks that it’s all about hiring, which is obviously very important for any fast growing business.

“Our primary need as a company is to grow and hire. Hiring is very difficult. By being in this mid-location, you have the widest circumference of hiring. When you are in San Francisco, you are limited to hiring people in The City. When you’re in Palo Alto, you can only hire folks there. But Burlingame is 20 minutes from either city via Caltrain or car,” Ramey said.

Ok, I guess he does has a point, but the PEZ Museum is still the bomb.

After that article was written we received another call from the media to get our thoughts on what it’s like being a tech startup in Burlingame, but this time it was the local Comcast station up in San Francisco. They wanted one of us to come to the studio so that we could talk about the big draw of being in Burlingame, so I volunteered to stop by their show and get interviewed on my way back home (I live in the Inner Sunset in San Francisco).

With my super shiny face aside I feel like the interview went great and they were all a lot of fun to work with. To be honest, I’m a little disappointed in myself for also not mentioning the PEZ Museum either — I definitely should have given it the air time that it deserves. You can check out the interview for yourself below or over here on YouTube.

So are we starting a tech startup trend in Burlingame? I can’t be for sure, but I would say that we’re definitely helping put Burlingame (and the PEZ Museum) on the map.

Other startups who are also helping with the tech startup trend in Burlingame include Datastax, Jobvite and CarWoo!. If I’m missing anyone, feel free to let me know in the comments below.

I think it’s an appropriate time to use one of my favorite sayings: “We’re as happy as a clam” to share that Mashable, one of the leading social media and tech news sources, just opened up their self-service ad sales on isocket!

If you’re into the world of social media and you haven’t somehow heard of Mashable then you’ve probably been living under a rock that’s hidden in a barn that’s stuck in a cave in the middle of nowhere. Yeah, they’re that awesome. The great team of people at Mashable are growing and doing big things.

Want to reach 13 million tech savvy visitors? Check out the run of site ad packages on Mashable’s advertising sales page.

Their inventory includes run of site ad zones of the 728×90 leaderboard, 300×250 medium rectangle, and 160×600 wide skycraper varieties. You can also sponsor the 300×250 med rec in their RSS feed to reach half a million subscribers.

We just made some tweaks to how you place a CPM ad order when adding it to your cart, why not give it a test run with an order?

With Mashable, TechCrunch, some exciting new publishers about to be announced soon, and our other great tech/startup blogs – BuyAds.com is the best place anywhere to reach these premium targeted audiences.

More to come

We’re going to SXSW! For those who aren’t familiar, South by Southwest Interactive is a 5-day conference where ~15,000 geeks, entrepreneurs, bloggers and hackers come together to learn from each other and have some fun.

The isocket Customer team (John, Ryan, Jason, Amanda) are going to be there from Thursday through Monday. While Hup and John are veterans to SXSW, Amanda and I are newbies and together we’re going to be the Ultimate Make-Advertising-Suck-Less Ninja Force.

If you’re an isocket publisher, have advertised with us or are just curious about how you could train for the 100 pushup challenge – come say hi! We’d love to buy you coffee, a drink or a meal and chat about how we can make buying and selling advertising easier and more awesome.

We’ve met some really cool folks at other events like BlogWorld Expo and we’d love to connect with you at South by Southwest. The best way to get in touch is probably via twitter – we’re @isocket.

We’ll be stepping up our game to the next level. I mean, Hup and I did perform in front of hundreds of folks with a live band at The Palms Hotel during BlogWorld (and yes, there were handstand pushups involved) so who know’s what’s going to happen at SXSW? Hang out with us and find out!

The Cheezburger Network, one of the largest networks of entertainment sites on the web and home to LOLcats & Fail Blog, is exclusively using isocket to power their direct and self-serve ad sales.

You may have seen Cheezburger on isocket a few months ago. They started with a pilot test on some of their properties. After pausing to reshuffle their growing empire of sites, they have now fully launched on isocket. You can buy impressions across all of their websites, separated into 4 groups.

Check out their inventory and sponsor the lolcatz now! Reach over 15 million visitors per month for an awesome price of $6 CPM.

Working with Cheezburger is fun.

True story: our CEO John was recently giving a demo of isocket to a really big corporate publisher, in a meeting room with projectors and suits and all that. While everyone was getting settled, he pulled up www.icanhascheezburger.com to show them. Someone hurried over and whispered “Dude – unprofessional! Your screen is showing up live on the projector. Stop playing around on lolcats!”

And because we get to write stuff like this on their isocket payout checks…

Noticing a pattern…

Cheezburger was recently in the news for raising $30M in venture capital. Congrats! We’re starting to see a pattern here – isocket publisher TechCrunch gets acquired by AOL, as does BlogWorld co-organizer Deb Ng’s blog, and a few others. Does using isocket mean you’ll get funded or acquired?!

Probably not, but it’s fun to think about =)

At isocket, we know that doing direct sales can be confusing and frustrating. That’s why we work so hard to build a product that eliminates some of the painful manual parts. But besides building product, we know there are other ways we can help publishers make more money.

From talking with our many publishers, we’ve gotten a sense of the sticking points of direct sales, and from studying their successes, have learned what works and what doesn’t.

In an effort to share that knowledge, we’re hosting a webinar called “Power Up Your Ad Sales” where anyone can sign up to learn more about how to:

1. Optimize their isocket account and make the most of isocket’s features
2. Employ the most effective strategies and tactics for closing ad sales and making more revenue

We’d be honored if you joined us. To sign up for the webinar, just head to: http://www.isocket.com/promo/powerup

The webinar will be held on Tuesday, February 22nd starting at 6pm PST / 9pm EST.

If you can’t make that time, register anyway and we’ll send you a link to the recorded webinar so you can watch it at your convenience. See you there!

We’re big fans of Tim Ferriss. His NY Times #1 best selling books The Four Hour Work Week and The Four Hour Body are wildly successful, and his messages about how to “hack” your life for the better have helped a lot of people. He’s also a geek and active in the web community!

Starting today, isocket is the exclusive advertising provider on his blog! Tim runs a great blog with an active community over at http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/

Check out Tim’s advertising options on his isocket page.

True to Tim, they are keeping their ad packages simple but powerful. You can buy a one month sponsorship in the great 300×250 medium rectangle ad spot on the top right of every page. You’ll get around 1 million impressions over 30 days, for an eCPM of $4. That’s a great opportunity to reach a highly engaged audience of life hackers.

Update:

Wasting no time, the first ad campaign was already purchased by the fine folks at Athletic Greens, who’s nutritional “superfood” was featured in Tim’s new book the Four Hour Body. Congrats to Tim and Athletic Greens!

Like any other product that wants to become the most awesome thing ever, isocket feels like getting feedback and ‘constructive criticism’ is super important. So important, in fact, that we have had a uservoice page since we’ve had a public page to put it on. Seriously, we even blogged about it (yeah, THAT important).

Case in point (not that you need proof), this suggestion was brought up by one of our publishers and we rolled it into the live app within just a few days. Can I get a boo yah?

Besides getting feedback we make it a high priority to answer any questions that we can regarding our product and how it can work for different types of publishers. I’m not sure if you know this or not, but if you talked to 50 different publishers who are generating revenue from ads they are probably doing it 50 different ways. When you keep this in mind, the fact that many publishers need some questions answered before they use us isn’t surprising.

To help facilitate the answering of these questions we have just rolled out live chat functionality that anyone who is browsing our website can use at any time. Even though having live chat is pretty cool, the real reason for us implementing it is that many publishers don’t know what questions they’ll have until they look over our pricing and features and we want to be there to answer the questions they have right when they need them answered.

Here’s what the live chat looks like on an external, public isocket page:

Another cool thing that we’ve done is include the live chat functionality on all of our publisher’s internal isocket pages so that if they have a question about how to set something up or if they have feedback they want to share, they can do it quick and easy.

Here’s what the live chat looks like on an internal, customer-only isocket page:

At the very least Jason and I will be standing by for live chat during our business hours (and any other time we’re available online), but if for some reason we’re not available for live chat when a question comes up the chat app turns into an email tool that allows a screenshot of the page you’re on to be sent directly to us.

We’ve already used live chat to help out a few of our current isocket publishers after only launching it a few days ago and we’ve also been able to answer questions for several other people who were looking at what we had to offer. If you want to give it a shot, feel free go to http://isocket.com and start chatting it up with us — real humans are standing by.

If you’re curious about what live chat product we’re using, it’s called SnapEngage and all of us here at isocket would highly recommend it if you’re currently looking for a solution.

Also, just so you know — we’re not completely getting rid of UserVoice — we’re going to link to it somewhere internally on isocket so that our customers can still use it to make suggestions and to keep up with the progress of new features we’re going to be rolling out.

So here’s the deal — me and my isocket homeboys John and Jason are packing up and heading out to Las Vegas today for the always awesome BlogWorld. Personally, this will be the third time that I’ve made it out to “The largest social media conference in the world” and I’ve got to say that every year I end up meeting some amazing people (which I feel like is the real goal of going). It will be John and Jason’s first time to check out the event and even though it was hard to talk them both into leaving the office and heading out to Las Vegas for a few days (I really had to twist their arms), somehow I did it.

When taking the time and spending the money it takes to go to a conference like this (like Jason and John did last week in Brooklyn) it’s a good idea to have some goals and reasons for going in mind before taking off — especially when your conference is in Las Vegas where there are plenty of distractions. From an isocket standpoint here are the main things that we’re looking to get out of going to BlogWorld and if you feel like you can help us out with any of them, we would love for you to try. Don’t be shy, let us know — we’re more than happy to exchange some of our sweet isocket swag for helping us out.

Reconnecting With Awesome People We Already Know
A conference like BlogWorld, although in an entirely different city, is a great place for some of us non-stop hustlers to slow down a bit and smell the flowers. Most people set some of their “other work” aside for a few days, which allows them to connect with people they’ve been wanting to catch up with for who knows how long. We plan on doing a lot of this because from what we can tell, there are going to be a lot of people we know hanging out in Vegas. It’s always great catching up with everyone.

Meeting All Kinds Of New Publishers
This is probably one of our biggest goals considering that we had our public beta launch about 3 months ago. We are always on the lookout for bloggers, website owners and any other type of publisher who feels like they would like some help getting into the world of direct sales. **PITCH ALERT** All of us here at isocket are building a tool that can help any type of online publisher add self-service and a layer of management to their direct online ad sales efforts, so if you or someone you know could use some help, be sure to let us know. We are oddly passionate about the entire online advertising ecosystem, so even if you just want to have a conversation about what you’re currently doing with your advertising, what you want to do with it and how isocket could potentially help you do it — we’d love to talk to you for all of the above. **END PITCH ALERT**

Learning Some New Stuff
Due to how fast the online advertising world is changing there are no real experts, but there are plenty of people who have some awesome experiences to share and the more we can learn about them, the better. There have always been awesome panels and speakers at the past BlogWorld events, so I’m sure that this year will be no different. Of course, a lot of the learning that goes on at conferences like this also tends to happen during dinners, meetups and coffee breaks that have nothing to do with the more organized and official BlogWorld stuff that’s going on, so be sure to get involved in that kind of stuff, too.

Other than all of this, we’ll just be hanging out and having fun so if you’d like to get in touch with us be sure to hit us up on Twitter (which everyone will be using to communicate). Our Twitter handles are:

• Ryan Hupfer (me): @Hup
• John Ramey: @jpramey
• Jason Shen: @jasonshen
• isocket: @isocket

See you in Vegas!