March 18, 2008
Marketers Don’t Get Social Networks
By Tom Ryan
Social networks are all about relationship building. Yet marketers are continuing to use mainstream advertising ploys – including hammering home messages – in targeting the medium rather than just having conversations.
“Frequency of message is not the idea here,” Rick Murray, president of Edelman digital, told Advertising Age. “Frequency of contact is.”
Charlene Li, VP and principal analyst at Forrester Research, agreed that marketers haven’t seemed to figure out that this is a channel where consumers actually want to be spoken to.
“[Consumers] are asking questions on these sites that go unanswered,” she said. “You can’t ask for a better environment. And what do marketers do? They say nothing and put up another ad.”
A successful example cited in the Advertising Age article was Disney’s dance-themed film, “Step Up 2 the Streets,” which has sold $53 million in ticket sales in the past four weeks. Disney continually revitalized the MySpace profile it created for the original 2006 movie “Step Up” to help drive the movie’s DVD sales but wound up expanding the movie’s already sizeable and enthusiastic group of fans for the sequel.
An in-theater Nielsen NRG survey conducted during the sequel’s opening weekend concluded that “Step Up 2 the Streets” was noticed more than its predecessor because of its MySpace profile. Of the respondents, 49 percent saw an ad or information for the movie on MySpace, compared with 37 percent who saw information on its profile for the original movie. About 58 percent of those with a MySpace profile recalled seeing an ad or information for the sequel, while only 26 percent of those without a profile remembered seeing anything about the movie.
Jack Pan, vice president of marketing strategy and special projects for Disney, told Advertising Age social networks allow marketers to get the most out of already established marketing properties. He particularly raved about MySpace’s ability to build brand ambassadors.
“The community part is big for us, because creating a forum for discussion and allowing a group to collectively share their interests with each other is like having a digital street team,” Mr. Pan said. “By giving these ambassadors content to play with and opportunities to be invested in, we feel like we’re providing value to them, and their enthusiasm can do a lot of marketing on our behalf. You see a much more lasting and viral impact than you would through other forms of media.”
Discussion Questions: What’s the difference between mainstream marketing techniques and efforts targeting MySpace and other social networking sites? How should mainstream advertising be tweaked to work on social networking sites?
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Social Networks like Facebook are about “discovery”–not getting something shoved in your face. In my Facebook, I’ve added the “IRead” application. I can see who else is reading the same book and then see the books they are reading. There are literally thousands of applications, so creating an application might be the best way to go.
Retailers are going to discover social networking any minute now!…because the younger audience “lives” there. Traditional marketing efforts are burdened by friction!–having to purchase a newspaper to get a coupon, waiting for a television program to come on, rebates that can take months.
In contrast, teens, who are just a few years away from setting up households and establishing lifetime buying patterns, believe in the “instant.” They don’t read newspapers, so newspaper coupons don’t work for them. They won’t walk into most department stores because it takes too long to find things. They’re used to being able to access music, books, television shows, and movies online, at any hour. They’ve ignored email in favor of Facebook because it provides instant updates on what’s in and what’s out. Marketers will ignore Facebook and other social networking sites at their peril.
Nikki Baird is right about experimentation! One approach would be to allow social network users to announce their favorite stores. In any case, retailers, if they want to be relevant to younger customers, will need to go where they are. And where they are is online.
Social networking is NETWORKING which is not advertising, with several significant differences. In advertising the company controls the message. Networking is a conversation–the company may control the initial message but how it gets passed around and commented on is interactive and not under the control of the company. Obviously those creating advertising messages do not necessarily have the expertise to create networking messages. The company can not create the message, put it out there, and move on to other things. Someone in the company needs to monitor the site being used for networking before, during, and after the message is posted.
If these aren’t enough challenges, the audience for the networking messages is highly skewed and won’t work equally well for everything.
It seems to me there actually is a model for how brands can use social networking effectively, and it comes from the way Adobe (and perhaps other major software developers?) monitors its user-to-user support forums with, for lack of a better term, brand ambassadors.
Essentially, these ambassadors hang out on the forums and get into the discussion when users run into an especially intractable problem–if there’s a fix the users just aren’t seeing, or especially if it seems the issue is surfacing a real bug in the software. Then the ambassadors offer their help and, yes, open themselves to a fair bit of criticism that generally sounds like this: “It’s not you, Pat; you’re great, and we really appreciate your help. But Adobe really needs to….”
Social networking for brands, then, can follow the same model, and probably relatively inexpensively, with one or two people per brand covering the major networks, preferably in-house, so they’re up to speed on what’s really happening with the brand.
Ideally, they would have their own pages on the networks, where they’d identify themselves as the brand ambassadors, and start relevant discussions. For CPG, maybe, they’d talk about weeknight dinner ideas and throw out recipes, and invite folks on the networks to offer feedback on their pet peeves.
I’m sure, for instance, they could get a lively discussion going on baking-mix boxes that look as if they have a handy perf strip across the top for easy opening, but in fact they require a chain saw after it becomes apparent that the perfing machine didn’t perf the paperboard all the way through! 😉
Seriously, though, the keys would be to be present, be genuine and be interested, and let the friends come to you.
I’ll say first that I don’t get these social networking sites either. Part of is that no one I know uses them, so it makes it hard to realize the “network” part. But I think I lack the social networking gene.
But I think Marc’s comments are indicative of the problem. The problem is that most people think that “advertising” and “marketing” are interchangeable. So no one’s cracked the code on “advertising” on social networks, but that’s exactly what they shouldn’t be used for. However, as we as a society figure out what these sites are for, we’ll figure out how to use them in our marketing efforts. But that’s still a moving target–the sites themselves are still evolving, so it’s early to put a stake in the ground and say, “This is how we should be using this medium.”
Watch and learn–and experiment! That’s what we need to be doing.
I agree with Marc’s comment about Social Marketing being more about “this is who we are” rather than “buy our product”. The great thing about the internet is the feedback is instantaneous–when you say “this is who we are” you will either have folks concur or disagree, which has the two-fold benefit of both increasing your brand awareness (because you are ENGAGING your consumer) and measuring how the consumer perceives your brand (rather than how you think the consumer perceives your brand).
I don’t think the return is any harder to measure than other Mass-Media channels (excludes Direct Marketing), especially using data tracking solutions that measure “brand-buzz” across Social Networks. We have recently been leveraging such data in marketing-mix models to evaluate their impact on sales over time.
It is very, very important to be transparent about what you’re doing on a social networking site like MySpace or Facebook. Keep in mind that the majority of the members on those sites are of the generation that is not easily swayed (not to mention reached) by marketing, and they prefer their favorite brands “keep it real.”
The statement made earlier about “who we are” rather than talking about “what we’re selling” is a huge point.
Additionally, this is not the right place for every brand or product and should not be the primary driver of a marketing plan for even those who do belong there. Energy drinks might make perfect sense, but lawn fertilizer…probably better off on a networking site for more mature audiences, if even there.
This is my week to say, “go Max!” Anyone who has followed the latest financial news knows that no one yet has answered the monetization question for social networks. The problem is, in part, one of scale. Disney can make a great play for a single picture but since community efforts are by definition, tailored, specific and (per my colleague Charlene’s comment) responsive, they don’t scale well.
Marketers will need to prioritize which products, services, initiatives require an all out social networks push and invest the resources in those to make a difference. Blanketing all the networks with ads for everything is the easy (and lazy) way but it won’t pay out ultimately for either the advertisers or the networks.
Social networking is paramount for certain items and services with target markets that are very active several hours every day in that domain. I would caution all manufacturers and advertisers that social networking is not just for the young and the restless. There are a number of active networking sites for professionals and mature adults. It’s a great opportunity for those with insight and the wisdom to partner with the right experts and consultants to do it right.
By its very nature, social marketing is in fact not really marketing. At least in the way that everyone thinks marketing should be. That would explain why the agencies are having such a hard time working within the “rules” of social network sites.
There’s a very big difference between saying “buy our product” and “this is who we are.” The second statement is more acceptable among social network standards, but the return is harder to measure. This is due in large part that there should be no call to action, promotion, or incentive. By offering these, the social profile has now become noting more than an advertisement and will most likely be shunned by other network members.
As agencies are generally measured by the results of their campaigns, to create a campaign whose results cannot be effectively measured beyond awareness, I think they may be hesitant to recommend such campaigns to their clients. This is compounded by the fact that social sites allow for both positive and negative responses to be posted and viewed by others, further taking away the agency’s control.
If you knew how to effectively use social networking sites to successfully drive sales, you would be far ahead of the crowd. Even the owners of the sites (MySpace and Facebook) have not yet cracked the code.
The key is to not using mainstream advertising. Yet, in recent surveys, CMOs indicated that they do not have the resources and knowledge to create advertising specifically for social networks.
This will undoubtedly change as time goes on. But for now, advertising on social networks is a hit and miss proposition.
Consumer behavior in social marketing is very different than mainstream.
While mainstream marketing is a one way conversation with the objective of engagement, social marketing only works if the consumer becomes engaged. It’s not a question of tweaking mainstream work to fit into social marketing, rather it’s recognizing the behavior of the social marketing target.
The biggest challenge to marketers is learning the new systems to maintain and evaluate social marketing efforts.
The big advantage for Disney: their movies are special. Most brands aren’t special. Social network sites work well for something special. For something copycat me-too boring, social networking will fail.
And how many advertisers project wit or intelligence or eroticism? Without any of those 3, how effective can a social network campaign be? And how many brands project any of those 3 key attractions?
Few retailers or brands have taken the time to research how to best use the social networks for marketing efforts. Therefore, most efforts have been to slam their regular mainstream marketing onto these sites–a huge mistake. Retailers and brands would do well to research the many quality “how-to” sites for social networking entrepreneurs. These sites provide excellent lessons on how to write compelling content for blogs, social networks, etc.
Key points:
• Remember: These are conversations not ads. Talk, engage, but don’t sell.
• Who will do the postings on blogs, MySpace, etc.? They must speak with an authentic voice, aligned with the company’s voice.
• Can you commit to regular updates? If not, don’t start.
• Have you prepared for the inevitable complaints and bad comments about your brand/product?
• Give stuff away. The way you gain trust with your audience and get them to buy your product eventually is to prove that your stuff is worthwhile. This method is used to great advantage in information marketing and should be utilized in product marketing.
• Test, test, test, and test some more. This medium is continuously evolving and the best are always looking to tweak their approach.
The old adage…”it depends” comes to mind.
There are some very focused…and a few very useful social networks.
MyBaby.com (by MyWebGrocer) is one that does a pretty good job. It is for new parents who have questions and concerns and they can talk to one another about a variety of new parent issues. Advertisers include both retailers (Lowes Foods for instance) from who parents can actually buy baby stuff through the online shopping capability. The retailer is only served up to participants who are in the North Carolina area where Lowes Foods plays.
It isn’t perfect, but it would seem that this type of social network would lend itself to creating some excellent opportunities to join needs with solutions in a collaborative environment. This “solutions” environment would beget additional traffic, which would beget additional solutions and so on….
Harder to extend this type of focused environment to a general site such as MySpace, but not impossible.
Social networking is new, fun and used by a growing number of consumers. Retailers need to remember these consumers are your future or potential customers. It’s important to look for the right applications for building brand ambassadors.
And I’d say having some younger people on a retailer’s marketing team adds new insights into these networks. Listen and learn.
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Social Networks like Facebook are about “discovery”–not getting something shoved in your face. In my Facebook, I’ve added the “IRead” application. I can see who else is reading the same book and then see the books they are reading. There are literally thousands of applications, so creating an application might be the best way to go.
Retailers are going to discover social networking any minute now!…because the younger audience “lives” there. Traditional marketing efforts are burdened by friction!–having to purchase a newspaper to get a coupon, waiting for a television program to come on, rebates that can take months.
In contrast, teens, who are just a few years away from setting up households and establishing lifetime buying patterns, believe in the “instant.” They don’t read newspapers, so newspaper coupons don’t work for them. They won’t walk into most department stores because it takes too long to find things. They’re used to being able to access music, books, television shows, and movies online, at any hour. They’ve ignored email in favor of Facebook because it provides instant updates on what’s in and what’s out. Marketers will ignore Facebook and other social networking sites at their peril.
Nikki Baird is right about experimentation! One approach would be to allow social network users to announce their favorite stores. In any case, retailers, if they want to be relevant to younger customers, will need to go where they are. And where they are is online.
Social networking is NETWORKING which is not advertising, with several significant differences. In advertising the company controls the message. Networking is a conversation–the company may control the initial message but how it gets passed around and commented on is interactive and not under the control of the company. Obviously those creating advertising messages do not necessarily have the expertise to create networking messages. The company can not create the message, put it out there, and move on to other things. Someone in the company needs to monitor the site being used for networking before, during, and after the message is posted.
If these aren’t enough challenges, the audience for the networking messages is highly skewed and won’t work equally well for everything.
It seems to me there actually is a model for how brands can use social networking effectively, and it comes from the way Adobe (and perhaps other major software developers?) monitors its user-to-user support forums with, for lack of a better term, brand ambassadors.
Essentially, these ambassadors hang out on the forums and get into the discussion when users run into an especially intractable problem–if there’s a fix the users just aren’t seeing, or especially if it seems the issue is surfacing a real bug in the software. Then the ambassadors offer their help and, yes, open themselves to a fair bit of criticism that generally sounds like this: “It’s not you, Pat; you’re great, and we really appreciate your help. But Adobe really needs to….”
Social networking for brands, then, can follow the same model, and probably relatively inexpensively, with one or two people per brand covering the major networks, preferably in-house, so they’re up to speed on what’s really happening with the brand.
Ideally, they would have their own pages on the networks, where they’d identify themselves as the brand ambassadors, and start relevant discussions. For CPG, maybe, they’d talk about weeknight dinner ideas and throw out recipes, and invite folks on the networks to offer feedback on their pet peeves.
I’m sure, for instance, they could get a lively discussion going on baking-mix boxes that look as if they have a handy perf strip across the top for easy opening, but in fact they require a chain saw after it becomes apparent that the perfing machine didn’t perf the paperboard all the way through! 😉
Seriously, though, the keys would be to be present, be genuine and be interested, and let the friends come to you.
I’ll say first that I don’t get these social networking sites either. Part of is that no one I know uses them, so it makes it hard to realize the “network” part. But I think I lack the social networking gene.
But I think Marc’s comments are indicative of the problem. The problem is that most people think that “advertising” and “marketing” are interchangeable. So no one’s cracked the code on “advertising” on social networks, but that’s exactly what they shouldn’t be used for. However, as we as a society figure out what these sites are for, we’ll figure out how to use them in our marketing efforts. But that’s still a moving target–the sites themselves are still evolving, so it’s early to put a stake in the ground and say, “This is how we should be using this medium.”
Watch and learn–and experiment! That’s what we need to be doing.
I agree with Marc’s comment about Social Marketing being more about “this is who we are” rather than “buy our product”. The great thing about the internet is the feedback is instantaneous–when you say “this is who we are” you will either have folks concur or disagree, which has the two-fold benefit of both increasing your brand awareness (because you are ENGAGING your consumer) and measuring how the consumer perceives your brand (rather than how you think the consumer perceives your brand).
I don’t think the return is any harder to measure than other Mass-Media channels (excludes Direct Marketing), especially using data tracking solutions that measure “brand-buzz” across Social Networks. We have recently been leveraging such data in marketing-mix models to evaluate their impact on sales over time.
It is very, very important to be transparent about what you’re doing on a social networking site like MySpace or Facebook. Keep in mind that the majority of the members on those sites are of the generation that is not easily swayed (not to mention reached) by marketing, and they prefer their favorite brands “keep it real.”
The statement made earlier about “who we are” rather than talking about “what we’re selling” is a huge point.
Additionally, this is not the right place for every brand or product and should not be the primary driver of a marketing plan for even those who do belong there. Energy drinks might make perfect sense, but lawn fertilizer…probably better off on a networking site for more mature audiences, if even there.
This is my week to say, “go Max!” Anyone who has followed the latest financial news knows that no one yet has answered the monetization question for social networks. The problem is, in part, one of scale. Disney can make a great play for a single picture but since community efforts are by definition, tailored, specific and (per my colleague Charlene’s comment) responsive, they don’t scale well.
Marketers will need to prioritize which products, services, initiatives require an all out social networks push and invest the resources in those to make a difference. Blanketing all the networks with ads for everything is the easy (and lazy) way but it won’t pay out ultimately for either the advertisers or the networks.
Social networking is paramount for certain items and services with target markets that are very active several hours every day in that domain. I would caution all manufacturers and advertisers that social networking is not just for the young and the restless. There are a number of active networking sites for professionals and mature adults. It’s a great opportunity for those with insight and the wisdom to partner with the right experts and consultants to do it right.
By its very nature, social marketing is in fact not really marketing. At least in the way that everyone thinks marketing should be. That would explain why the agencies are having such a hard time working within the “rules” of social network sites.
There’s a very big difference between saying “buy our product” and “this is who we are.” The second statement is more acceptable among social network standards, but the return is harder to measure. This is due in large part that there should be no call to action, promotion, or incentive. By offering these, the social profile has now become noting more than an advertisement and will most likely be shunned by other network members.
As agencies are generally measured by the results of their campaigns, to create a campaign whose results cannot be effectively measured beyond awareness, I think they may be hesitant to recommend such campaigns to their clients. This is compounded by the fact that social sites allow for both positive and negative responses to be posted and viewed by others, further taking away the agency’s control.
If you knew how to effectively use social networking sites to successfully drive sales, you would be far ahead of the crowd. Even the owners of the sites (MySpace and Facebook) have not yet cracked the code.
The key is to not using mainstream advertising. Yet, in recent surveys, CMOs indicated that they do not have the resources and knowledge to create advertising specifically for social networks.
This will undoubtedly change as time goes on. But for now, advertising on social networks is a hit and miss proposition.
Consumer behavior in social marketing is very different than mainstream.
While mainstream marketing is a one way conversation with the objective of engagement, social marketing only works if the consumer becomes engaged. It’s not a question of tweaking mainstream work to fit into social marketing, rather it’s recognizing the behavior of the social marketing target.
The biggest challenge to marketers is learning the new systems to maintain and evaluate social marketing efforts.
The big advantage for Disney: their movies are special. Most brands aren’t special. Social network sites work well for something special. For something copycat me-too boring, social networking will fail.
And how many advertisers project wit or intelligence or eroticism? Without any of those 3, how effective can a social network campaign be? And how many brands project any of those 3 key attractions?
Few retailers or brands have taken the time to research how to best use the social networks for marketing efforts. Therefore, most efforts have been to slam their regular mainstream marketing onto these sites–a huge mistake. Retailers and brands would do well to research the many quality “how-to” sites for social networking entrepreneurs. These sites provide excellent lessons on how to write compelling content for blogs, social networks, etc.
Key points:
• Remember: These are conversations not ads. Talk, engage, but don’t sell.
• Who will do the postings on blogs, MySpace, etc.? They must speak with an authentic voice, aligned with the company’s voice.
• Can you commit to regular updates? If not, don’t start.
• Have you prepared for the inevitable complaints and bad comments about your brand/product?
• Give stuff away. The way you gain trust with your audience and get them to buy your product eventually is to prove that your stuff is worthwhile. This method is used to great advantage in information marketing and should be utilized in product marketing.
• Test, test, test, and test some more. This medium is continuously evolving and the best are always looking to tweak their approach.
The old adage…”it depends” comes to mind.
There are some very focused…and a few very useful social networks.
MyBaby.com (by MyWebGrocer) is one that does a pretty good job. It is for new parents who have questions and concerns and they can talk to one another about a variety of new parent issues. Advertisers include both retailers (Lowes Foods for instance) from who parents can actually buy baby stuff through the online shopping capability. The retailer is only served up to participants who are in the North Carolina area where Lowes Foods plays.
It isn’t perfect, but it would seem that this type of social network would lend itself to creating some excellent opportunities to join needs with solutions in a collaborative environment. This “solutions” environment would beget additional traffic, which would beget additional solutions and so on….
Harder to extend this type of focused environment to a general site such as MySpace, but not impossible.
Social networking is new, fun and used by a growing number of consumers. Retailers need to remember these consumers are your future or potential customers. It’s important to look for the right applications for building brand ambassadors.
And I’d say having some younger people on a retailer’s marketing team adds new insights into these networks. Listen and learn.