Friday, March 27, 2009 4:35 PM EST

Why are Advertising and Social
Media Mixing Like Oil and Water?

Oliver McIntyre

by Oliver McIntyre

Brian Morrissey’s recent Adweek piece states that Social networking has overtaken e-mail as the most popular Internet activity, according to a study released by Nielsen.

Active reach in what Nielsen defines as “member communities” now exceeds e-mail participation by 67 to 65 percent. It goes on to state that social networking and blogging venues are growing at twice the rate of other large drivers of Internet use such as portals, e-mail, and search. Neilson concluded that the shift to social activity online would have profound effects on marketers and publishers. For publishers, social networks are eating into time spent with other online activities, according to Nielsen. For advertisers, the phenomenon at this stage represents a mostly unfulfilled promise for a deeper connection with consumers who are more difficult to reach in social environments. The Nielsen study also highlighted that Facebook’s greatest growth has come from 35-49 year-olds, and it has added twice as many 50-64 year-olds as those under 18.

Brian goes on to point out that advertising and social media to date have mixed like oil and water.

Why? And What’s really changed over the past year?

Adweek.COM , Feb 2008 - a Forrester research survey stated that ad agencies were not well structured to take on tomorrow’s marketing challenges, needing to move from making messages to establishing community connections. In the report, the research firm paints a grim view of the current state of advertising, which it believes is in "a world of hurt" because consumers are tuning out the messages the industry is predicated on producing. Instead, it believes shops need to be organized around communities, not disciplines. What it is calling "the connected agency" would not only know certain communities but also be active members of these groups.

Pushing messages would give way to encouraging voluntary engagement, and ongoing conversations would replace time-based campaigns. Another study published by McKinsey & Co posited the most important corporate resource over the next ten years would be talent and the ability to create a 360-degree agency.

Social media is the fastest growing Internet marketing channel, one that has the power to go viral. It engages and consumes an audience in meaningful conversations about a brand, product, company or issue. The social media-marketing umbrella includes sites that are both Web 2.0 and Web 1.0 - basically you want to be anywhere that enables discussions, sharing, and user-generated content (UGC), such as blogs, forums and discussion boards, consumer review, sites, social networks / online communities, social bookmarking sites, social news sites, social music sites, video and photo sharing sites and Wikis.

Understanding What Social Media Can & Can’t Do is Key Before We Start to Develop a Strategy for a Client.

Social media can engage your audience, encourage online conversations that are user-generated, increase your web presence, expand brand awareness, generate publicity (both good & bad), and provide SEO benefits.

Many marketers, will tell you that social media has no ROI but is great for brand building, relationship management, product development, reputation management, customer interaction, customer feedback, customer support, community building, and defensive SEO (yes you can bury the bad press with positive UGC).

Social media can convert if you own the community and have the power to strategically capture leads. As marketers, we must understand the distinction between ONLINE creative expression and real business objectives.

Wharton professor Eric Clemons’ analysis nailed it for me, and below are two paragraphs from his evaluation as he has defined it better than I ever can.

“Simple commercial messages, pushed through whatever medium, in order to reach a potential customer who is in the middle of doing something else, will fail. It’s not that we no longer need information to initiate or to complete a transaction; rather, we will no longer need advertising to obtain that information … Instead, we will use information that we trust, obtained at the time that we want to see it.”

“Advertising is the creation of a disconnected era when businesses needed some way to get a message out to prospective customers that they couldn’t reach directly. The purpose of an ad is to motivate the prospect to get in touch. The Web, as we all know, puts us all in direct, real-time contact with each other, wherever we are in the world. Instead of advertising a message and waiting haplessly for a response, businesses can proactively connect directly with their prospects, reaching out to them in contexts where they’re ready to buy. What counts on the Web is product placement, merchandising and other forms of direct promotion.”

Web is now channelized and communications has got to go way beyond the intrusive messaging of advertising. 3.0 or the Semantic web will allow us to use the enormous capacity of the medium to develop much more subtle methods of matching propositions to people at exactly the right time, price and place. That means the likes of Facebook will monetize its platform not by hosting banner ads, but by providing its users with applications.



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