Social Networks

Rudolph Muller

Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...

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It’s hard to avoid social networks these days. If you’re in marketing, wherever you turn, you are bound to encounter some kind of discussion about them and the promise they hold for advertisers.

SA isn’t immune to the trend, with international sites such as YouTube and FaceBook generating millions of impressions from South Africans each month, and many of the country’s major brands experimenting with using social network environments to reach their customers.

Many people believe that there is huge potential to monetise growing social network audiences through advertising because these sites have a mass of data to layer over traditional targeting criteria. This potential explains the valuations currently bandied about for social networking sites (it certainly isn’t the revenue these companies are generating).

However, it also seems that the recent attempts to use this data to advertise to these communities have been clumsy – indeed, if we are to be brutally honest, the results have been disappointing. Since sites such as MySpace, Facebook and YouTube have plenty of page views, users, and data points, it should be easy, but it just isn’t working.

Privacy is one big concern – FaceBook’s Beacon advertising technology is a case in point. Beacon collects data on the behaviour of Facebook users on several commercial Web sites, such as eBay, Fandango, Zappos and Overstock, and publishes them to users’ news feeds on the social networking site. The site had to apologise to its users and allow them to opt out from Beacon’s data collection and behaviour monitoring.

But an even more fundamental problem lies in the poor fit between social networking environments and traditional online advertising. I can’t help but wonder if these sites are desperately trying to force a square peg in a round hole. Surely we need to apply our minds and look outside of the confines of traditional advertising formats and campaigns in order to monetise social network audiences?

The nature of the environment and the relationship people is personal and intimate. It is each user’s own personal space, where they share their lives with others that they invite into their world. They do not join the environment to buy goods and services. They are there to catch up with friends, meet new ones, and engage in private conversations. This simply does not sound like an environment where uninvited brands are welcome.

A brand that that barges into a user’s space uninvited is not unlike a gatecrasher at a dinner party who keeps trying to hijack the conversation.

Advertisers need to be mindful that they don’t harm their brands more than they help them with clumsy attempts to move into the social networking space.

There is no single answer to the question of how marketers can tap into the potential of social networks, but we need to think outside of the narrow confines of traditional advertising formats and campaigns.

One tip is to make use of creative that draws the user into an interaction with the brand and lets him or her make the first move. Rather than trying to blast the customer with unwanted and intrusive ads, try to engage him or her with opt-in games, competitions, incentives, and applications that add value.

While many things are unclear about social networks, one thing is very clear. People like them, and find value in them. And where there is value, there is the potential to make money. We just need to find the round peg. As always in the online world, I suspect respect for the customer and the ability to respond to his or her needs is the answer.

Social networking discussion