Like Your Mom: Marketers Cling to MySpace, Facebook as the Hip Thing
Tuesday at ad:tech San Francisco kicked off with a profusion of “Power Panels.” Though it’s not clear what defines a “Power Panel” from a regular panel, I decided to drop in on “Power Panel: Social Network Marketing - Exploring The Value Proposition.” Led by Debra Aho Williamson of eMarketer, the panel aimed to define what the value proposition was for social networking. Williamsom somewhat awkwardly explained that social networking, like a cat, was now on its fifth life out of nine without providing any reasons as to why and later stating it was a growing, living thing. Awkwardness aside, the panel focused on two case studies to tell their story.
Looking at Burnout Band Slam 2 on MySpace, the promotion aimed to make companies appear as friends instead of advertisers. Shawn Conly of EA and Chris George of Fox Interactive Media stated that they engaged users through friending and commenting using a promotional account for a band competition on MySpace. Is friending and commenting truly considered engagement? Furthermore, are these basic social network interactions enough to cross over from advertisers to friends? Conly admitted that gaming definitely has an advantage in the online social networking and marketing space, just due to the culture and engaging content. True to themselves, advertisers care about numbers at the end of the day and Conly and George delivered. Through their MySpace campaign, they saw a 24x increase in traffic (from 890,000 to 22,000,000) from the “momentum effect” of directly-marketed-to users passing the content on to friends.
The following case study explored Target’s use of Facebook in their Dorm Survival Guide campaign. The campaign involved helping students show off their uniquely designed dorm rooms, using Target products as “social currency.” Giving G-rated advice to scared students about everything from roommates to design advice, Target aimed to offer a platform for college students within an already existing platform for college students. Jason Kleckner and Jason Ring of Target said that “social media is like a party” and that you need to translate your marketing speak into the language of the participants. It seems as if, even though advertisers throw around the transparency buzzword everywhere they can, their idea of transparency is being something they’re not, or apparently speaking a language that is not their own. There’s a difference between speaking like a human and speaking like a hipster, and advertisers don’t seem to have this delicacy figured out just yet.
While the panelists said that social network marketing is still an experimental medium, it seems little, if any, experimentation is being done. Clinging to the socially accepted and widely exploited social networks and being quoted in the panel as saying that they don’t want to be the first to do something, it’s difficult to take advertisers anymore seriously in the social network space when they’re joining in around the same time that your Mom gets a Facebook profile.
