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Brand marketers are just beginning to tap the potential of collaborative, community-focused websites, known collectively as social media or Web 2.0, as a communications medium. Early attempts to integrate social media into the marketing mix have often treated social media marketing (SMM) as an experimental, “viral” channel that exists outside the organization’s primary marketing and advertising initiatives.
These viral initiatives demonstrate a willingness to innovate and can provide excellent feedback on extreme changes in creative direction. However, the unpredictable nature of viral success and the uneven return-on-investment when such efforts are successful, make it an inadequate long-term SMM strategy. In addition, attempts to fake viral success by artificially promoting the content via paid “power users” (a technique known as “gaming”) offers questionable value at best, outside of large, temporary spikes in extremely low-converting web traffic.
While brand marketers increasingly understand the need for ongoing participation in social media, the lack of dedicated time, resources and expertise in the medium hinders many companies from developing social media as a more robust marketing and advertising channel that can be integrated with the rest of their marketing plan in cross-channel campaigns. These marketers report inadequate support from traditional marketing vendors in their SMM efforts, as traditional agencies often try to apply traditional tactics in an online environment that is typically hostile to those attempts.
Detailed planning, execution and reporting of SMM by an interactive agency with SMM expertise can make social media a viable and powerful channel within an integrated marketing campaign, complementing and enhancing the results from other efforts and increasing ROI for the entire initiative.
Unquestionably, social media has taken the web by storm over the last few years. As Internet users flock to community-focused, collaborative websites, marketers have struggled to determine effective ways to communicate their brand messaging to that audience.
One common method for using social media as part of a brand marketing campaign is to deploy wildly off-brand, “viral” content on social media sites to create buzz. Because social media audiences can be notoriously hostile to traditional advertising efforts on community-centric sites such as YouTube, Digg, and Facebook, this method was considered the only way for companies to capture the attention of the fickle and volatile social media audience. While there have been some breakout successes in this vein, this particular strategy is notoriously hit-or-miss. Also, aside from the raw traffic volume produced by a viral success, it can be difficult to quantify return on investment for such stand-alone social media campaigns, leading many marketers to consider social media marketing to be an unpredictable “experimental” channel at best.
Some brand marketers may still be wondering why they should go to all this elaborate effort in the first place. The reasons are many and compelling. Audiences in general are moving from traditional media to the web and from the static web to Web 2.0/social media as their preferred free time activity, according to a recent study by Fox Interactive Media1. Social network users spend more than seven hours per week on social networks, and most of them list social media interaction as their favorite leisure activity, above television.
If you’re still convinced that the social media audience consists mostly of teenagers, or that social sites don’t lead to traffic or conversions on commercial sites, think again. The same FIM study indicated that more than 40% of social networkers use those sites to learn more about brands and products and that advertisers Adidas and Electronic Arts attribute over 70% of their marketing return on investment to the “Momentum Effect” of social media. Analysis from Hitwise2 similarly indicates that in the U.K., social networks have overtaken webmail services in terms of both Internet usage and referrals to other websites.
A similarly compelling survey from IT Toolbox3, whose participants consisted of business managers, developers, executive decision-makers, IT analysts and IT decision-makers, indicated that social media content was their most trusted source of information for purchasing decisions, second only to vendor websites as a reference for purchasing decisions. This same audience of decision-makers indicated that they spent an average of 2.93 hours per week on social media websites, as compared to 2.89 hours per week on editorial media, such as InformationWeek, CNN, and WSJ.com.
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