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Social Networks

What are social networks? What is the hype and do they really work as an advertising medium for companies and marketers? Let’s take a look inside social marketing and then consider our bands and goals before being lured into a strategy that doesn’t suit our company.

The Pitch and the intrigue of Social Media for marketers and companies

MySpace today boasts more than 205,000 unique South African users, while the increasingly popular Facebook has attracted about 140,000 South Africans.

YouTube, the video-sharing service, draws more than 432,000 unique users and more than five million page impressions from South Africa each month. Friendster, LiveJournal, LinkedIn, and Flickr also all command significant audiences in South Africa, while local sites such as MyVideo, ITWeb's My Digital Life and 5FM's BlogJockey blogging platform have launched to compete against the international giants.

Apart from the size of the potential audience, social networking presents some exciting new ways for marketers to interact with their audience. As the ultimate "word-of-mouse" marketing platform, social networking is an opportunity to get to know your customers, speak to them in a language they understand, and encourage enthusiastic customers to spread the message for your brand.

You can even offer interactive applications to your customers and prospects - Facebook offers an open application programming interface that you can use to deliver little tools and applications to users.

The reality of Social Media

There is so much madness in the market space these days with companies trying to achieve the next social networking edge that will boost their brands to a higher playing field. Over the past months I have been watching and speaking to many clients, marketers and affiliates who have been trying to embark on these new mediums of marketing, and I have seen brands and companies fail in their stride... why?

It seems that many advertisers and marketers have not yet harnessed the potential of the social marketing craze. The medium also seems sketchy as FaceBook promises targeted demographic advertising on these portals that fail to produce results in a similar way to Google’s affiliate marketing or pay per click advertising module.

Perhaps this is due to the nature and purpose of a social network.  I am personally on many social networks and am not at all encouraged to click on advertising or be spammed by group mails that don’t interest me as an individual. The reason I am on a social network is to escape the daily bombardment of advertising and media in my almost everyday life .  I am far more interested in catching up with peers, friends and family - that is my goal and purpose when visiting a social website, not to find the latest product or recent news article.

IDEA: I would much rather a friend send me a message to my social network's personal inbox that actually interested me.

For Example: "Hey Morgan, you keen to join us at the Coke Fest this eve?". Perhaps the social marketing edge is to convince people to encourage friends and family to join them at an event or to use a product that worked for them (testimonials), products that truly interested them through a viral marketing strategy, rather than an advising strategy that bombards people with irrelevant information from a source that they are not familiar with. Imagine a social networking strategy that puts together 10 social networking ambassadors that have 400 friends in their friend list on a Social network, together these representatives have a combined power of targeting a personal database of 4000 people … with a truly personal message from a friend.....

The internet is becoming your personalized pocket of information, you no longer need to store information on your computer or visit one source to find information, but rather tap into pockets of information online and access them at any given time... When and how you want too…

This being said if I am interested in gathering information on news I would visit a trusted news portal, equally if I am interested in finding an array of products to purchase I would visit Jump.co.za.

I think companies and marketers should be smart about the way they engage a social network and understand the risks of a successful campaign using one of these mediums, as there are many other avenues one can use when promoting a product or service in the right targeted marketing environment.

Many marketers and companies have yet to truly make an impact on social networks. Due to the type of product they wish to market using these avenues, not every product or service will work using this medium