III. The Member – Message Dynamic
Just as members are demanding selfhood-amplifying tools from social media, so also do they seek activities that meet a similar end from the advertisers with whom they interact. Web 2.0 advertisers that do not aid in the self-expression, discovery, and interaction of social network members will achieve middling results.
But how can advertisers meet social network members’ selfhood needs?
First, advertisers must remember that while all social network members want to be more like themselves, the ways in which they each do that will vary. I don’t just mean that some people are heavy bloggers whereas others post a lot of videos involving ill-advised stunts. Rather, the audience within a social network must also be segmented into standard demographic and psychographic buckets.
Advertisers can’t simply “do a social network buy”; they need to smartly design a campaign within a social media platform for Bucket A, Bucket B, Bucket C, et cetera. Otherwise, mass market products will find they need to be all things to all people, and if American interests are any indicator, we all want to see multimedia of troubled famous twenty-somethings in various states of distress (or undress). So advertisers truly speaking to the authentic interests and curiosities of the vast swath of Americans will only abet a deeply mediocre race to the softly pornographic, slightly drunken middle.
Not that pornographic; more-than-slightly drunken
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Avoiding this tragedy requires that mass market brands segment so their message can be delivered uniquely in the target’s language (in the broad sense of the word), and niche brands need to efficiently deploy marketing funds so that they reach said target. This appropriate segmentation and targeting enables advertisers to speak to members’ needs in an honest, real way; it’s the advertisers that do this that are most likely to see their campaigns succeed.
Once the brand has segmented their audience and aligned a message accordingly, it’s now poised to help members feel good about themselves and/or meet other needs. For example, a lot of social network members like to add brands as friends. Why? Well, brands are the ultimate “friends with benefits.”
Why members add brands as friends:
- 29% want notice of exclusive offerings or sales
- 28% were recommended by a friend
- 23% want to associate with them
- 23% want free samples
(Also, brands never whine about how you never have time for them; they just send you more coupon codes.)
So an advertiser should consider ways in which they can be a good friend to social network members, or – better yet – a great friend, and the best kind of friend helps you realize a dream. And what do the page view-driving masses within social networks want most? Fame and exposure. A brand that can help a member feed into their frenzied fantasies of fame will find their brand exposure interests aligned perfectly with member interests of personal brand exposure.
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To meet their objectives, brands can also tap into insights of the influentials and affluentials. Bloggers think they’re special, so a brand offering exclusive video to top relevant blogs feeds into this megalomania. What about incentives? As Modernista has said, “Incentives are for the weak.” It’s true that short term gains from incentivizing often come at the expense of long term value, and anyway, no one wants to be the guy that people only like because he’s rich and gives away free stuff. With no offense to a certain outfit in Delray Beach, Florida, all the gratis iPods in the world aren’t as effective for driving long term value as meeting someone’s core needs. Selfhood trumps stuff (or at least, the kind of stuff that prevailing profit margins can afford).
So the true advertising value in UGC is found in that intersection between what users want and what advertisers want. By investing upfront in a studied consideration of member needs, what will the advertiser get in return? Pans Labyrinth was able to market their DVDs to the original “friends” they’d made during the theatrical release. More broadly, smart advertisers in UGC environments will benefit from the consumer-to-consumer (C2C) pass-along effects. For example, in a campaign I’ll discuss in more detail in the next section, Adidas drove 609K initial profile page views. 75K (12%) of these visitors interacted with the Adidas page in some way; 84% of these people (63K) added something “Adidas” to their own profiles and 51% (38K) passed something along to their friends, exposing an additional 35K people to the Adidas campaign.
Campaign to date? 22MM impressions of the Adidas brand per month (including their own page as well as branded assets on member profiles). In addition, purchase intent, intent to recommend, and positive brand associations all increased. Across all brand advertisers who have intelligently deployed SMP campaigns, 30% of their results are attributable to traditional business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing, while 70% of campaign results can be tied to the C2C momentum effect.
Could Adidas have achieved the same success if they’d not taken the time to understand user needs and design a campaign that met those needs? Would they have done as well if they’d simply “done a social network buy” and bought some slop remnant inventory through an ad network? In my experience, buying 300×250 inventory from the slush pile might work to meet internal political ends – to get the upper management monkeys off your back with their broken “We’ve got to do a social network buy!” record – but it seems the best long-term use of brand dollars is an integral, and integrated campaign. Sure, it’ll probably be more expensive upfront, but the ROI could be significantly greater, resulting in a much smarter use of shareholder dollars.
This gives us some insight into how members relate to advertising messages. But how should SMPs handle commercial messages?
To be continued. See comment box for link to next section.
