[...] Remembering the Many Opportunities of Social Media -not just the Impacts of Advertising [...]

[...] Remembering the Many Opportunities of Social Media – not just the Impacts of Advertising [...]

[...] Remembering the Many Opportunities of Social Media -not just the Impacts of Advertising [...]

[...] Remembering the Many Opportunities of Social Media – not just the Impacts of Advertising [...]

[...] Remembering the Many Opportunities of Social Media – not just the Impacts of Advertising [...]

[...] Remembering the Many Opportunities of Social Media – not just the Impacts of Advertising [...]

Facebook, MySpace – younger people or single folks whose life patterns include a desire to maintain high levels of communications with their peers, friends and relationship prospects.
LinkedIn – people who want to organize their work relationship to help with job/career related questions, help access companies via existing relationships, help find a job.
Ning/Get Satisfaction – tools to organize communities around activity/life stage/brand, behavior, demographic, taste affinities or around common communications contexts..

as we know, each of these contexts can be broken down into the standard set of design artifacts: cognitive map’s, activity maps, persona’s, behavioral segments, scenarios etc. – has forrester done this kind of analysis? has anyone done an ethnography on the various major styles of social networks (I know the list above is light and probably way off, but as mentioned, I am trying to get a sense for how the internet internet audiences have organized themselves around SN’s to jump start a formal project into mapping an existing b2c business into the space using traditional design methods (that includes secondary research) – does anyone know where the centers of study are on SN segmentation research?

[...] (This is a response to a conversion on Jeremiah Owyang’s blog at web-strategist.com about Remembering the Many Opportunities of Social Media –not just the Impacts of Advertising . I spent enough time on the response that I wanted to post here as [...]

Consciously or not, we all make a Value|Risk assessment before we choose to convert from prospect to customer.

An enterprise’ initial experience in Social Networking should be to establish a presence and engage its existing client-base. In my presentations and conversations, I drive that point hard and also drive the point that an enterprise should NOT initially use SN to gain market share. What I don’t drive as hard and maybe should is:

By virtue of visibly and actively facilitating a conversation with its existing market, a brand will passively expand its market.

Perhaps we should remember that consumers still get to choose (even when lead to water) to convert. In the Value|Risk assessment, we recognize value in the existence of the conversation. We feel a reduced risk because we derive a sense of security knowing that we will be heard if a problem arises.

Because a consumer can derive this additional Value and reduced Risk WITHOUT participating (just lurking), it becomes almost impractical to measure.

I hate to think that we’ll have to get to numerous market surveys to convince the masses. However, this leaves the playing field less impeded for those wanting to adopt now. Cheers to them!

Aaron Wall’s post really adds another layer to the discussion by arguing that social media also presents co-branding opportunities. If the brand is targeted at specific niches, I totally agree. If it has broader appeal, I argue a brand building campaign on social networks will also be effective.

The main point is that everyone loves search advertising because it delivers a measurable result – user engagement in the form of a click. We can not rely on that for CPM social media advertising because user engagement is not the primary goal. The goal is to build awareness of the brand and link it with specific attributes. To properly measure the success of these campaigns, we need to use traditional consumer product advertising tools like surveys measuring brand recall.

I have heard the “social media ads don’t work” mantra so many times that I am really roused up to get the word out that there are other ways to look at this issue. Thanks for raising attention.
As always, thought provoking posts!

[...] Equally noted Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang responds with “Remembering the Many Opportunities of Social Media –not just Impacts of Advertising” [...]