Marketing in the Social Media Eco-system

A recent MediaPost post by David Goetzl in regard to a Forrester Research survey about social network advertising asks: Can Ads Be Effective on Social Networks? While the answer was largely “yes”, there is a finer point to be made.

The key here is that the people surveyed said they would be interested in “engaging” with their favorite brands. Social media is all about engaging; the interaction – that’s the heart and soul of the whole thing. It’s not a top-down transmission from a content provider broadcasting a message out to a passive audience. Social media is active interaction among a network of peers. And that’s exactly how brands have to behave to be effective.

Social media consumers are active participants. They create content. They share content. They are having a discussion. In fact, they are having lots of discussions simultaneously. The vast majority of banner ads are passive content. That’s why they can be so easily perceived as crossing the line into being intrusive. By their nature they are an interruption in the flow of social media activity.

To be effective in this space it is absolutely essential to consider the eco-system. That’s what sets the Brickfish social media solution apart. The programs Brickfish promotes are all about leveraging the activity social media consumers are already engaged in – only incentivizing them to create, distribute and comment on brand content. We believe the win comes from promoting brand messages by enticing users to engage with brand content but doing it within the natural social media eco-system.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 6th, 2009 at 6:15 pm. It is filed under Social Media and tagged with marketing, media, social. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.