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Being clued in to the social networking scene is a boon for savvy online marketers looking to expand their customer reach.
Sites that rely on user-generated content are altering the human fabric of the Internet and the way that performance marketers reach out to customers and merchants and communicate with each other. Online marketers are testing all of the new communication methods – blogs, social networking sites, wikis, and photoand video-sharing sites – to see if these platforms can help them drum up business.
And with good reason. The popularity of many of these emerging areas is seeing steady, if not explosive, growth. Blogs, which allow users to easily post new content to their site as well as effortlessly link to other sites, are on fire. Forty-four percent of American Internet users read and post on blogs, discussion boards and other consumer-generated media outlets according to a February 2006 Pew Internet & American Life project study. Technorati reports that approximately 70,000 new blogs are created every day and that the total number of blogs doubles at least twice a year.
But it's not just blogs. Social networks, such as Bebo and MySpace, are communities in which an initial set of founders sends out messages inviting members of their own personal networks to join the site, and new members repeat the process, are a new national phenomenon. As of July, MySpace has 72 million members, Bebo has more than 57 million members and hi5 has more than 40 million.
In addition, there are single-use social networks where people share one type of topic such as YouTube.com for video, Flickr.com for photos, Digg.com for news stories, Del.icio.us.com for links and Wikipedia.com for encyclopedia articles.
All these types of collaborative platforms are the crux of the Web 2.0 model where the ease-of-use technology allows anyone the ability to contribute.
These sites are built to harness the breadth of experiences so everyone can benefit from the collective wisdom – they have the advantages of collaborative group input but because these services are online and can be anonymous (through aliases), users are not afraid to dissent, according to Jim Nail, a former analyst at Forrester covering the social networking space, who is now the chief marketing officer of Cymfony. "Therefore there is not concern about the dangers of 'groupthink,' when individuals intentionally conform to what they perceive to be the consensus of the group."
And when it comes to growing social groups MySpace.com leads the pack. In July, Hitwise announced that MySpace.com, for the first time, was the No. 1-ranked website in the United States based on the number of visits. MySpace.com accounted for 4.46 percent of all Internet visits in the U.S. for the week ending July 8, 2006 and has propelled past Yahoo Mail. Bebo increased its market share of visits by 21 percent from May 2006, the largest percentage increase among the social networking websites.
THE SOCIAL BUTTERFLIES
So who's hanging out at these social networking sites?
Nielsen has identified a group, called "My.Internet," that's especially likely to visit networking sites. Sixteen percent of Web users belong to this group, which has a median age of 32. Nearly all members of this group – 99 percent – visit blogs; 84 percent are members of an online community; 57 percent have their own blogs; and 22 percent use RSS feeds. Nielsen reported that "My.Internet" users tend to be highly engaged with most of the websites they visit, as measured by 10 factors, including whether they "liked" the site and were likely to return.
With all of the promising information about traffic and demographics, advertisers are eager to get their messages in front of the young and wired demographic that favors the social networking sites. Combined spending on blog, podcasts and RSS advertising skyrocketed 198.4 percent to $20.4 million in 2005. It is expected to grow another 144.9 percent to $49.8 million in 2006, according to an April 2006 report from PQ Media, a custom media research firm.
But advertising on social networking sites can be tricky, and marketers need to take strategic and creative approaches. The audiences skew younger, and often these younger audiences are exceptionally adept at tuning out traditional banner advertising – therefore pushing ads no longer works.
Mark Brooks, an analyst for OPW.com, says, "Interruption marketing is old school and not appreciated by the younger audience. Marketers wanting to use social networks need to put their thinking caps on and get creative.Case in point: Burger King is sponsoring downloads of episodes of 24. Very cool and very viral and plays to the MySpace demographic perfectly."
In addition to advertisements and sponsorships, marketers know that the buzz generated on social networks is much more of a powerful endorsement than any form of promotion. In fact word of mouth is widely considered the most powerful form of marketing and the wave of the future for influencing sales. According to a December 2005 McKinsey report, approximately two-thirds of all economic activity in the U.S. is influenced by shared opinions about a product, brand or service.
Forrester Research's 2004 study showed that over 60 percent of consumers trust product recommendations found in online sources like discussion boards. A 2004 RoperASW report, now part of GfK Group, found that over 90 percent of Americans cite word of mouth as one of the best sources of ideas and information. Further, they rate word of mouth twice as important as advertising or editorial content and put one-and-a-half times more value on it today than they did 25 years ago.
Dave Evans, moderator of the social networking panel at Ad:Tech San Francisco in May and co-founder of Digital Voodoo, along with Dave Ellett, CEO of Powered, examined the purchasing funnel of ACP (awareness, consideration, purchase). They saw that the majority of traditional advertising dollars, such as interruptive efforts like television commercials, is applied at the awareness point in the ACP. But because consumers are increasingly finding ways to block advertising through TiVo, spam filters and do-not-call lists, the impact of these types of traditional advertising has diminished. Now marketers are not only tasked with how to get their messages through to potential customers, but they must also worry that their potential customers are increasingly talking with each other and "comparing notes."
To counter this problem, Evans says that, "When marketers reach out in the consideration phase, they contact consumers at the precise moments that they are thinking about a product or service. Through consumer-generated media and word of mouth, evangelists can actively impact consideration processes."
The advantage of social networking for marketers is that it does not involve interrupting like an advertisement (which is in the awareness phase) does.
LEVERAGING SOCIAL NETWORKS
There are a variety of ways marketers are taking advantage of consumer-generated media and word of mouth. Continued on Page 2...
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