Cantarella isn’t making big promises that the largely experimental effort will increase Time.com’s online ad revenue by much at first. The company is pitching “Stay Connected” to clients as a way of targeting a more influential audience. “We want to show how we can track users who come to Time.com from our Twitter and Facebook pages and how we can get advertisers’ messages in front of those users,” Cantarella said. “They’re not always the typical Time.com reader. These are in many cases a new audience for us and for the advertisers.”

The placements are fairly subtle. On Twitter, the words “Sponsored by Siemens” are integrated all over the background on Time.com’s page, while on Facebook, the sponsorship mention is in an area under the photos of other Time fans. The idea was developed and executed fairly quickly, Cantarella said. About a month ago, he and his team were trying to figure out some custom programs for advertisers like Siemens and decided to find a way to use Time.com’s own social media real estate. “The ads are being put in places where we ask users to take an action: fan us on Facebook, watch our videos on YouTube. They’re not just passively seeing a brand message. They’re much more engaged.”

Aside from building ad revenue, Time.com hopes that the effort will support its bid to raise its social media profile and get Facebook and Twitter users to visit the site more often. For 2009 so far, the average monthly unique visitors is approximately 7 million, according to Nielsen Online. Unique visitors increased more than 40 percent from July 2008 to July 2009, but Nielsen has changed its methodology and increased the size of its panels, so the comparison isn’t perfect.