September 30, 2006

How to market to social networks

by Brian Turner

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Problems of marketing to social networks

As hype over Web 2.0 makes social networks a prime target for marketing and advertising campaigns, some of the same mistakes in the dotcom boom of Web 1.0 are being repeated.

Chief among these is the belief that if you throw enough money at websites, the returns will justify the marketing spend.

The problems here are ad blindness and indifference in web users, which makes them not simply skip over ads, but ignore them when noticed.

An additional problem is that a lot of big agencies are pushing product-specific marketing money into generic social networks, so the targeting is already very poor.

Add these factors together and you end up with marketing spend that converts poorly, and could probably have been better utilised in other advertising campaigns.

To overcome these problems, marketing spend needs to focus on the key elements of first targeting users on a more efficient basis, and secondly, make it difficult to be ignored by web users.

Marketing misunderstands social networks

All too often marketers think of market segments in terms of consumers defined by criteria such as age, gender, etc.

However, the expansive nature of the internet means that consumers can be defined directly by their interests.

Not only this, there are many online communities on the net that cater for users with distinct interests.

Unfortunately, it is overwhelmingly the entrepreneurs who have, in their minority, seen and acted upon this.

Meanwhile, marketing companies and departments either completely overlook them, or else consider them as little more than advertising hoardings.

Additionally, where companies have been forward enough to make direct advertising arrangements – such as banner, PPC ads, or similar, targeted at specific communities, doing so completely fails to appreciate the real strength of a targeted online community – it’s viral marketing potential.

Even worse, some amateurly thought-out campaigns often believe that simply joining a forum to post a press-release constitutes the beginning of a viral marketing process.
At best, it’s unsolicited advertising and ignored.

At worst, it’s unsolicited advertising that can be regarded as spam and set up negative reputation for the company in question.

The point to underline here is that in majority marketing fundamentally fails to understand both the role of the online community, their marketing potential, and how to connect with it.

This is made even worse because the internet is a social phenomenon, and websites are nodes of interaction in a vast international community.

This failure to understand the social web is a profound failure of modern marketing.

Targeting social networks

The most ideal way to match company to consumer on the social web is to isolate strategic areas where communities already exist, built around that business vertical, and target them directly.

This can be done pretty easily though keyword targeting on search engines, such as Google, Yahoo!, or MSN. Sample keywords may involve a general market or product area, along with delimiters such as “forum” or “community”.

Other methods involves searching through forum directories, such as Big Boards, which catalogues the largest internet forums on the net.

The likelihood is that after a search, there will be hundreds of online communities in most business verticals.

These will likely be dominated by a small number of huge forums, with a larger number of medium-sized forums, and an even larger number of small forums.

This means that the largest number of users can be accessed by marketing directly to just a handful of forums.

However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that marketing just to these forums is necessarily going to be the most efficient.

Ideally, a marketing spend will seek to test a number of forums of different sizes and seek to track responses from all according to different criteria, such as size of forum delineated by post total, member total, and active member totals.

Then there is real data collected, to be used to increase the efficiency of the marketing campaign and associated spend.

The independence of online communities

Internet communities are usually fiercely independent. The users often expect to be able to speak frankly and honestly. A marketing company disrespect this at their peril.

Even if that means the company itself comes under fire for its products and services.

After all, if there’s general agreement among users that a specific company has a problem, then the paradigm of “the consumer is always right” must hold true. You cannot demand users change the opinion of a company simply because the company wishes it.

Marketing campaigns should also be cautioned against trying to buy out online communities outright, unless they make it clear before and after purchase that the community independence will not be violated.

Otherwise, the result is that the community may well disperse and move on, robbing the marketing dept of its most valuable asset – the very users they wishes to target.

How to work with online communities

Any organised attempt to market to a community may invariably be regarded as an invasive process unless the independence of the community is assured.

This means that the community needs to be wooed. Exclusive free gifts, special offers and discounts, competitions, latest news, and even free advice, are all good ways to do this.

In doing so, the key element of marketing to an online community becomes apparent – you can tap into a very real viral process that works not just on the target community, but ripples out via member blogs and postings by members on other forums they frequent.

Tips on working with online communities

1. Be positive

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