The Future of Marketing via Social Media
Social Media is no longer viewed as just a hobby or a passing fad. According to Adweek, a handful of advertising and PR agencies are seeing the potential of web-based client promotion and have recently launched Social Media divisions in addition to their more traditional offerings.
As more advertising dollars continue to make their way to the internet, Brain Sells notes that “more than just ad dollars following a trend or digital hype, the growth is being driven due to real changes in behavior: (the) rising number of people online, the introduction of cheap laptops and the growing popularity of TV shows on the Internet.”
Furthermore, ChasNote shows us the migration of U.S. ad dollars in which the amount of money spent online in 2007 swelled to $21 billion, an increase of almost 26% from the previous year:
The social media teams at various agencies are becoming savvy enough to realize that buying up ad space on large networking sites like Myspace and Facebook is not necessarily the answer. Michael Nathanson, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company states that “the jury’s still out on MySpace’s ability to monetize” and “we don’t have much conviction in the long-term ability to grow this business based on what we’ve seen lately.”
Instead, the future is pointing towards more focused ad campaigns targeted at niche blogs that have highly faithful followings. As Dave Allen, Director of Insights & Digital Media at Nemo Design says, “Companies should be advertising directly to those niche groups and networks that include people who would like to hear from their brand. (On other social media sites) the brands need to wait until they are invited in. A mass, scatter-shot approach to the large social networks will only fail.”
The bottom line: there is no quick way to propel a company to the top through social networking; it takes time and the earning of users’ trust. The competition is constantly growing and social media users are becoming increasingly savvy. Patrick Garrett, Outrider’s U.S. managing director is right when he proclaims that “social media is a long-term investment.”
Tags: Advertising, Facebook, MySpace, Nemo Design, social media, Social Networking
June 26th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
One issue that keeps coming up over at Facebook is a big one - privacy. Just today the company had to takedown an app called Top Friends when it was discovered that a “security hole exposed the birthdays, gender, and relationship status of strangers, including Facebook executives, the wife of Google co-founder Larry Page, and one profile that seemed to belong to Paris Hilton that used her middle name “Whitney.” This kind of slip-up will continue to make advertisers nervous.
Read Facebook Suspends App That Permitted Peephole