It appears that marketing and advertising companies have hit some road blocks when it comes to online advertising; perhaps road block is not the right term, multiple forks in the road may be more correct. The new, new thing for the ubiquitous panels and conferences on the subject is the question how do we wrestle and pin down users on the big social networks and push brand advertising at them?. Currently there is no simple answer to this conundrum.

In a keynote address at the Interactive Advertising Bureau conference June 2nd, the co-founder and CEO of Social Media Networks, Seth Goldstein said - “Social media is killing advertising, a few years ago people started to become more interested in each other [online] and less interested in advertising.” Currently standard banner ad response rates are under 1% and search is not geared to brand advertising therefore social media is the next frontier for major marketers to attack but how will that be done?

Social Networking offline

One problem is that there is too much focus on the big social networks such as Facebook and MySpace. Wired’s editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson, argues on his Long Tail blog that social networking should be a feature, not a destination because the one-size-fits-all model of Facebook and MySpace will eventually give way to a multitude of narrowly focused sites with social networking built in, such as the 220,000 niche networks hosted on the Ning platform. With CPM’s at rock bottom on sites like MySpace he argues that the smart money is going to the niche sites, where laser-focused content and community makes targeting easy.

Marketers need to understand that within these hundreds of thousands of niche communities brand advertising will only work if the community invites them in. The brand ads will also have to be highly relevant to the community and be content-driven at the same time. Pushing branded ads into these communities will backfire. [As a user I find the ads that Facebook pushes at me highly irritating as they have no context to the content I share with my friends.] The brand has to join in the conversation within these communities too and that means listening in on the many quiet conversations that take place all the time on the sites - the chatter could be about shoes, handbags, tech gadgets, music, film, beer who knows?

The other way that marketers could deal with this problem is to reverse their thinking. Ensure that their brand customers’ web sites have a social network feature on their respective home pages. Attract the customer to the brand site and then let the more vociferous and influential fans of the brand get the discussion going; lovers of the brand will soon follow.

Tags: Chris Anderson, Long Tail, Nemo, Seth Goldstein, social media, Social Networking

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 9:00 am and is filed under Advertising, Agency, Branding, Nemo Design, Social Networking, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.