Monday, December 15, 2008

Brands have to change the way the get Advertised through Social Media

Social Network Advertising is a Waste of Time…” from left the box.

I was impressed by reading that. The last months the only thing you can read around and about is how impressive is to use Social Networks for Advertising Brands.

The old model of int eruptive advertising will not work well on a platform based on communication.
Not only that it becomes from many examples more and more obvious that we can't use new things inspired by old models and approaches.

But it's not the ad network inside Facebook that is at fault but how it is being used... Randall Stross takes his own look at brands on Facebook in the NY Times. He questions the meager examples offered up by P&G and the somewhat empty experience of becoming a "fan" or "friend" of many brands. The Crest Whitestrips fan page dwindled from 14,000 back down to 10,000 following the wake of a promotion.
Randall wonders if the effort of endless promotions to keep that number up may be prohibitive. Actually, it looks like Whitestrips has a weekly drawing or free product. While not the most inventive promotion, I can actually imagine that being useful to people. He questions the promise of "social advertising" and the latest shiny object from the Facebook ad sales team, "engagement ads." A micro targeting test revealed a single person who perfectly fit that profile. Brands are struggling (when experimentation gets "hard" it feels like a struggle) with how to make use of Facebook and other social networks. Some go the advertising route. Some create fan or group pages without much strategy beyond acquisition of fans or friends. Even Victoria's Secret which has "acquired" some 790K fans on it's Pink Facebook pages, has not demonstrated the ability to do anything with that list yet. Why not create a contest around my brand idea? Because it is not something people care about. This is also one of those cases where the real action was happening on the brand domain contest site.

Facebook was merely an "acquisition window" for contestants. At least Victoria's Secret is delivering content right into their Facebook page.

Wrong Conclusion

Brands can spend a fortune creating "genuinely entertaining commercials." Wrong.

Brands have a third path. They can shift gears from being the entertainment between the real entertainment to being of-use to people. To truly earn their attention and engagement, brands must provide customers something of value via their marketing efforts. An application that helps them save money or be more productive. Content that helps them do something more than just buy more product. An experience with the product. Or an invitation for customers to contribute what is important to them - content, product ideas, feedback, communications, messages make things and approaches better, more interesting.

There is so much more that brands can do to deliver value beyond the next generation of hyped-up advertising. Brands have to use their imagination in order to get the best out of Social Media and not use old tricks to new areas. What is necessary is complete new approach about how brands can use New Media and Social Media in order to get advertised. Social Media isn't the trend you have to use it, you are obligated to use it. Social Media is a brand new world where only new tricks, ways, approaches will make it interesting to people, to audience to final consumers. At the end they are the most important

/ga

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Really good oppinion about brands advertasing... There is a lot to do if we want to change them.... keep working :))