Last week I caught a blog post at FutureNow which cited Ted McConnell, General Manager-Interactive Marketing and Innovation at Procter & Gamble Co from a recent interview in AdAge. To quickly paraphrase both FutureNow and McConnell, social media is mislabeled - it's not a form of media in any traditional sense of the word where people come to engage with information but rather a communication tool in which the user is an active participant and you [the advertiser] are competing to take them away from their intended goal. Acknowledging that social sites really are about a user to user relationship and not about showcasing advertising brings up an interesting question - should you even bother engaging in social spaces? My answer is unequivocally yes but with a different approach than you've ever used before.
If we agree that social is truly about communication than any message on it has to be a part of the conversation and not just noise around it. Most of the time when I ask people what they're doing on social sites the response is something along the line of "we buy ads in social sites." More "sophisticated" companies may even have their own profile page on a social network which they drive internal and external traffic to through advertising. Better but still missing the mark and really just noise combined with a little content. Its noise that's become the problem and yet noise is all companies seem to want throw out there yet they keep hoping for results
Moving beyond noise is essential to being a part of the user's experience and having any chance of capturing their attention but you can't move outside of the realm of noise if you're still buying media to drive people off track. Successful companies understand that social requires becoming a part of the experience rather than trying to pluck the user out of it. By building integrated experiences these companies take a step forward in establishing a relationship with the user bringing them into their fold and bring themselves out of the traditional advertiser - consumer relationship.
Building this relationship isn't easy and you can't just pick up the phone, order ad inventory and deliver creative to start working it. Instead you have to look at the scenario and your service and explore where you can provide a message that goes outside of merely speaking at the consumer. This means understanding the purpose of their visit and offering solutions that fit within it. Providing an application to let people customize a show in their profile fits within their experience, telling them you sell shoes like the ones in their email message does not. Offering advice on love questions on your profile in the form of a blog is value, blogging about how your book answers people's top questions about love is noise. The difference again conversing with the user as opposed to simply talking at the user.
Finding the right fit within social media isn't just about how you use it, it's also about where. Too often companies focus on the "big name" sites without thinking about relevancy. This is a huge mistake of course as people may be on flickr to share photos of a trip to Disneyland but probably aren't there to book a trip back any more than they're on to get a new ERP system for the office. On the other hand someone chatting at the Disney forums in the planning a trip area has a great shot of being exactly who you want to reach just like they will be the next day when they head over to linkedin to look up answers to their question on ERP tool. In both cases the user is consuming social media and there to complete a task but suddenly the message is relevant not just to the terms of general focus of their engagement but to their immediate experience. With focused relevancy you can become a lot more important to the conversation and not just relevant to the topic.
When there's a fit both in the user's needs and the relevancy of your site to what they are thinking about at that time advertising becomes possible and can often be a good idea but throwing out ads is only part of the equation and will always been dicey choice if that advertising just takes the user away from the experience. Instead what you want to do is build advertising that ties back into to the site. This can come in the form of literal conversations, applications, assets, or anything else that allows for an exchange that's complementary to the particular social media site's goals. If people like to personalize their page on myspace with your photos you've provided value, but don't think the same value will exist on linkedin or youtube.
Don't stop with advertising. One of the best ways to be seen as value and not just noise is to become a part of someone's network. Often this is simply another way of saying create an advertisement page but that's not what I mean. Over the years I've seen a handful of sites where brands have become involved on a low level with the users, responding, sharing, and engaging. Even if you can't get one-on-one you can certainly blog or share content of some other sort from your events, you can allow commenting, respond in aggregate to feedback and be seen as a voice and not just a banner. Once you do this your advertising takes on a whole different feel and opens the door to showing a different offering. Now when you promote your business in ads you're promoting contributions and content rather than just pages with product lists which have no relevancy to the social media experience.
Of course all of this is dependent on flexibility. If you're running campaigns to push sales and don't have any interest in relationships for the long term, customer experience or really being viral than just buy your ad space, try and target it and accept your place as noise. However if your company understands that not every campaign is going to have a sale in 15 minutes there's a ton of opportunity out there. Years ago I watched a company in the scuba diving category enter the ecommerce market, build a reputation as experts and real people and now they're one of the top selling sites in the niche with almost no advertising. If they had focused on the sales they got in week one they would have cut bait and run from every site they engaged on, every user they talked with but instead they took a very old concept of talking with their customer and put it online with bits and pieces of traditional interactive media to support it and as relationships flourished so did sales, both immediate and long term.
There's always immediate sales to be had and letting people to get to the ordering process is essential even on social networking sites but for most people in a space that's all about communicating with other members being able to interact and read is the conversion action. If you focus on the sale now you lose the opportunity and are really just buying media in a place where it isn't wanted which is probably not the best place to put your money.
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