There’s been a lot of data and chatter surrounding the marketing prospects for social media lately, especially as it relates to search marketing. Often there is a competitive aspect to this as analysts and marketers alike seek to find The Next Big Thing. Just as some f0lks rush to anoint even half-baked search engines as the next “Google-killer” so too do some pundits pronounce the death of search spending – slain by social media.
Far be it for me to criticize an either/or argument in a digital marketing world but it seems to me that pitting search and social media against each other is to miss the point entirely. They are different entities that relate to each other (as we’ve pointed out in the past) but there simply isn’t enough there yet for social media marketing to suck up search dollars.
This is a major component in the article that Reprise Media’s Managing Partner Peter Hershberg wrote for Silicon Alley Insider this past Friday. In it, he begins to sketch out the parameters that social media sites that hope to capture marketing dollars will have to follow in order to be successful. In essence he calls for social media sites and marketers both to recognize the need to give up some control in order to benefit.
The example he points to in the article is a real one: a social media platform that tried to bully marketing dollars into display ads because that was their only form of on-site monetization. As he describes it – “The underlying issue was that in exchange for paying them they were offering nothing else – not better targeting or metrics or functionality. They did offer ad space but that wasn’t what we wanted, or what would offer the most benefit to their community and our client. I’ll grant that they can do what they want with their own platform but some folks would call that a shakedown. In their ham-handed quest to control this interaction, they ended up closing the door to a potential revenue source.”
What this also exposes are the widely varied degrees of maturity in the social media space between companies like YouTube and LinkedIn which have developed some fairly integrated ways to earn marketing bucks without causing a user revolt, sites like Facebook which are in my estimation still at the midway point (some good ideas and some that have backfired without yet finding a happy medium), and sites like Twitter that haven’t even dipped a toe in the water yet (or Wikipedia which has purposely held back from making any sort of marketing an integral aspect of the site.)
These are all perfectly legitimate places to be on the spectrum, and are related to the age of the companies in question as well as their perceived missions and how users make use of what they have to offer.
What Peter cautions against when he talks about control is what the aforementioned social media platform attempted in trying to get marketers to pay for something that was of limited value, rather than determining how the unique aspects of their community could be leveraged in a way that benefited marketers, the platform owners, and the users.
Of course this means giving up a measure of control, but is that such a bad thing? Coca-Cola evidently doesn’t think so. AdAge had a great article over the weekend on Coke’s ultra-popular Facebook page, the second-most popular page on Facebook behind Barack Obama’s. Turns out the page was a true fan-created phenomena with no connection to the giant beverage maker. When Facebook came calling to enforce its new policy of only allowing brand reps to control branded pages and profiles, Coke stepped in. With over 3 million fans they knew it was a valuable page as is, and likely also knew the bad publicity that would attach to the brand if they allowed Facebook to go ahead and delete a page that for the most part had been beneficial. Their decision was to ask Facebook to keep the page as is, with the same two civilians running things and a couple of Coke people added on to keep an eye on things.
Here’s a case where Facebook and Coke gave up a little bit of control in exchange for an enhanced user experience. For Facebook the next step now that they are making a clear space for brands and their pages is to figure out what kind of extra content (analytics, the ability to reach out to superfans to disseminate assets) brands would be willing to pay for and begin to charge for these profile pages.
Questions or comments? Feel free to leave them here or check out Reprise Media folks on Twitter.
