Jeremiah Owyang’s latest post, “Forrester Report: Best And Worst Of Social Network Marketing, 2008,” answers a question that came up constantly in the early days of F8 and the Facebook goldrush: “how can my business leverage the success of social networking technology?”
The answer: companies who leverage the member-to-member aspect of social networks outperform companies who try to use social networking technology in a website-to-member fashion.
A more succinct way of putting this is “content dumping onto social networks doesn’t work; enabling your customers to interact with each other through a branded web service does.”
This is what I said in my original post about monetizing Facebook applications: apps that make it are ones that add new dimensions to the interpersonal experience of Facebook.
Jeremiah’s post points out some companies who get web 2.0 and some who don’t, and I thought his examples were actually pretty good case studies in themselves. I actually liked his post so much that I might throw down some cash to buy his company’s report on the subject.
If any of you have some examples of good or terrible marketing on social networks then please leave them in the comments; I’d really like to take a look at some more of the bad ones, although we could all learn a lot more from one or two good ones.
If you want to use your own company as an example, you have my blessing: please promote yourself.
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Comments 3
Excellent, I’m glad we agree. So many brands ‘throw’ marketing at a community and miss the big opportunity: socialization.
Posted 19 Jul 2008 at 4:29 am ¶Couldn’t agree more. Content dumping defeats the purpose of social media in the first place, but it’s easy to see how so many companies can fall into that trap. One-way communication has been the practice ever since the early days of advertising; it’s hard for some companies to shake themselves out of the habit and adopt two-way communication, whether it’s customer-to-customer (social network apps) or customer-to-business (blogs, forums.)
Either way, great post Jeremiah. Glad I found your blog (I’d heard Dave McCLure mention it before) and I’m glad to have you on the blogroll.
Posted 19 Jul 2008 at 5:32 pm ¶I agree with you as well. The main problem that I and I think a lot of newer companies and marketers are facing is the question… “Which network will provide me the best results?”
Is it the network that has the most people in your niche? or just the most people altogether? Should a person have as many different social network accounts as possible and check them every day, or should they just stick to 1-4 of them and really put in an effort to communicate with everyone by posting comments, adding friends, responding to private messages, and building their brand recognition on those sites?
Posted 05 Jan 2009 at 5:02 am ¶Post a Comment