Why Brand Advertisers Will Be the Biggest Beneficiaries of Social Media and How You Can Participate
Sitting now in Michael Lazerow's session, "Why Brand Advertisers Will Be the Biggest Beneficiaries of Social Media and How You Can Participate." Lazerow is a great speaker and this will be the third conference after Graphing Social Patterns and Social Ad Summit where he has been able to retain me as an audience member. I really need to make sure I get a Buddy Media (cool blue) t-shirt from him this time :)
He starts with the slide, "Social media is here." 37% of adult internet users are using social media sites. All major social networks have opened up their platform. Brands now have cost-effective access to more than 500MM engaged users. 250 million of these users are on Facebook and MySpace alone.
There is massive distribution but still less than 1% of digital ad budgets flow into this space. Social advertising right now sucks. All the techniques that used to work in the past, don't work anymore. Clearly, we're at a junction where we need to invent what's next and how we need to get to the users. One of the problems today is that there is too much noice. Another problem is that it is not scalable. Third problem is that social advertising is not tied to results. We need to know what are the results and how to tie them. Over 100 companies are selling Facebook alone.
Social is not just about advertising. It's not about displaying banners. It's about marketing! It's about CRM and engaging conversations. It's about people.
Impressions are worthless. They are like air. There are so many impressions available today. In the social media sites, impressions are basically worthless. The whole model of buying impressions is like shouting at users and yelling at them.
The new model is Buy Engagement, Earn Loyalty. How do you turn your consumers into intense advocates of your brand? The intense adoption of , commitment to and interaction with a brand in social networks.
We've gone from shouting to listening in the new model.
Next, he is going to talk about case studies that generated results.
The most forward-thinking clients are building applications to support their marketing activities. These are not just facebook or myspace applications. Ad units are tied to a database connected to social graph. In the end these are ads, but better ads.
So why apps? Because of :
There are two main buckets of apps:
1. Ad applications and the second one is sponsored gift section. You can send a free airborne gift to your friends. Another example he is showing of Tropic Thunder advertising campaign by Social Media.
2. Social branded applications which are cross-platform, tied to CRM, "socialize" existing sites. These apps allow for engaging creative, scalable technology and you pay only for results.
Now is the somehat famous example of campaign Buddy Media did for FedEx. It's a very simple application but simple is sometimes the best. Results of this apps:
Next is New Balance campaign which was recently covered by MIT Review. Results:
Facebook just launched age-gating allowing for applications to be limited to a certain age group.
Next example is the "Dude" campaign socialized by Bud Light. They worked with anthropologists to come out with the perfect photos for the application. Results from 5 week long campaign (it's still live):
The single biggest mistake brands make is that they launch and expect it to be the top app.
How do you get started?
As always a great session by Lazerow!
He starts with the slide, "Social media is here." 37% of adult internet users are using social media sites. All major social networks have opened up their platform. Brands now have cost-effective access to more than 500MM engaged users. 250 million of these users are on Facebook and MySpace alone.
There is massive distribution but still less than 1% of digital ad budgets flow into this space. Social advertising right now sucks. All the techniques that used to work in the past, don't work anymore. Clearly, we're at a junction where we need to invent what's next and how we need to get to the users. One of the problems today is that there is too much noice. Another problem is that it is not scalable. Third problem is that social advertising is not tied to results. We need to know what are the results and how to tie them. Over 100 companies are selling Facebook alone.
Social is not just about advertising. It's not about displaying banners. It's about marketing! It's about CRM and engaging conversations. It's about people.
Impressions are worthless. They are like air. There are so many impressions available today. In the social media sites, impressions are basically worthless. The whole model of buying impressions is like shouting at users and yelling at them.
The new model is Buy Engagement, Earn Loyalty. How do you turn your consumers into intense advocates of your brand? The intense adoption of , commitment to and interaction with a brand in social networks.
We've gone from shouting to listening in the new model.
Next, he is going to talk about case studies that generated results.
The most forward-thinking clients are building applications to support their marketing activities. These are not just facebook or myspace applications. Ad units are tied to a database connected to social graph. In the end these are ads, but better ads.
So why apps? Because of :
- Emotion,
- Engagement,
- Efficiency and
- Social Intelligence.
There are two main buckets of apps:
1. Ad applications and the second one is sponsored gift section. You can send a free airborne gift to your friends. Another example he is showing of Tropic Thunder advertising campaign by Social Media.
2. Social branded applications which are cross-platform, tied to CRM, "socialize" existing sites. These apps allow for engaging creative, scalable technology and you pay only for results.
Now is the somehat famous example of campaign Buddy Media did for FedEx. It's a very simple application but simple is sometimes the best. Results of this apps:
- 100,000 installs in 72 hrs.
- more than 300K active users in 6 days
- less than 10% uninstall rate
- global audience in more than 200 countries
Next is New Balance campaign which was recently covered by MIT Review. Results:
- 250K active users
- 86% of visitors came back at least once
- 57% came back 9 times or more.
- 1M+ AceBucks earned by consumers playing the game, which can be redeemed for actual shoes.
Facebook just launched age-gating allowing for applications to be limited to a certain age group.
Next example is the "Dude" campaign socialized by Bud Light. They worked with anthropologists to come out with the perfect photos for the application. Results from 5 week long campaign (it's still live):
- 200,000 installs in 5 weeks of marketing
- first application to successfully implement an age-gate that prohibits minors from accessing the app
- 14% average daily active user growth
- 6,000+ daily active users during campaign
- 19% of users visited every day during campaign
- 185,000 installs in 6 weeks
- 78% of user base were InStyle's target demo of females 18-35
- avg. time on application almost 7 minutes
The single biggest mistake brands make is that they launch and expect it to be the top app.
How do you get started?
- Make goals. Track results
- Think big. Start small
- Go fast. Iterate. Iterate
- Socialize everything
As always a great session by Lazerow!
Labels: advertising, brand-advertising, buddy media, Facebook, michael-lazerow, MySpace, social-media, web 2.0, web2expo
posted by Frank at 8:32 AM
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