Publicidad futura en redes sociales, al alza

Dos artículos que hablan sobre publicidad en redes sociales:

• A nivel mundial: La prioridad máxima prioridad para más del 45% de los ejecutivos de marcas serán las redes sociales. Enlace aquí
  

• En España: Un 66% de los encuestados, profesionales del sector del marketig directo, declararon que invertirán en canales sociales en los próximos 12 meses. Enlace aquí
  

Es curioso que, en cuanto a medición de resultados, en el primer estudio "Para el 27,9% lo más importante será medir el tiempo que pasan los usuarios en determinados sitios, seguido de las visitas únicas de una página (23,7%) y el CTR (16%). El ROI, sin embargo, es lo menos importante para el 59%". Curioso porque como usuario de facebook, por ejemplo, no me parece que preste más atención a los anuncios cuanto más tiempo paso conectado. Presto más atención cuanto más relevantes son.

Me intriga saber si esa promesa de inversión en publicidad en redes sociales se materializará en los formatos de siempre. Si el ROI no importa tanto quizá no haya incentivo para buscar mejores formatos. Al menos el CTR sí cuenta...

Bart is on twitter

Not Bart simpson but BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) is on twitter. It says a lot about how fast this site is spreading around.

For the moment they are twitting on services updates (such as 10-min. delay between Concord & Pleasant Hill in Pittsburg & SFO directions due to equipment problem. Get all advisories at bart.gov/alerts.), other BART news, give-aways and promotions, pics and videos related to BART or trains...You can check it out here.

Are we social capital pack rats?

On a previous post, A note on "branded" email, I mentioned the study I carried out together with several classmates on the value proposition of social networking. Thang has spotted an article on The McKinsey Quarterly, When job seekers invade Facebook , that touches on two of the subjects we dealt with in our study.

The first subject is The transferability of "Social Capital" from offline to online. In our study we supported the thesis that, amongst other benefits, the value proposition of social networking has to do with accumulating social capital. As the article reads "Anthropologists tell us that it’s impossible to maintain stable social relationships with more than 150 people." True! Of course users do not maintain stable social relationships with all of their contacts. In-depth interviews with users showed us that usually social networking websites like Facebook work as a repository of potentially useful contacts.

In other words, we collect acquaintances, people we think we might reconnect with, be it for leisure or professional purposes. Given that storing contacts is virtually free, why not doing it? Who knows if I might need those contacts later?

[ Side note 1: Facebook uses a rigid and awkward mechanism to manage people in our network. Facebook forces us to label such an heterogeneous set of online contacts as friends. What about mimicking the offline categories we already use: friend, relative, work colleague, acquaintance.... "Contacts" could be the generic or default term. This taxonomy would allow users to manage privacy and content-sharing permissions in a more natural and transparent way. ]

[ Side note 2: Something that intrigues me are the psychological / sociological reasons behind this "contacts-collector" behavior. Does it have to do with a culture of not giving up choices?]

From a business perspective it results that within our social networks we have a humongous amount of potential value that we rarely convert into anything real. Deeper friendships, job opportunities, favors, or even romantic dates go unrealized. The biz question is very straight forward then: is there a way of materializing that diffuse social capital? In a meaningful way, beyond casual apps, I mean. The entrepreneur in me has a couple of ideas about it...

Let me finish with another quote from the article: "Overall, online social networking, with its support groups and trusted access, is governed by a culture of sharing, not selling." That also appeared as a clear conclusion of our user research. Does that mean that business models that rely on selling are completely preempted in social networking? Well, that is the second subject of our study I alluded to at the beginnig of this post: Creating and capturing value: Specialized vs. generalized social network platforms. I better end this post here or I would have to rename it as the never ending post... Audience, the discussion is served...anyone?

A note on "branded" email

In Spring 2008 my classmates Alexandra Levich, Jenny Xu and Thang Troung Minh and I carried out an independent study on social networks. The study was supervised by Professor Rashi Glazer, our marketing professor at the Haas School of Business.

The goal of our study was to identify and validate the value proposition of online social networking. Our overarching question was What is the social networks' value proposition and how is it perceived by consumers?. Apart from the explicit, several focus groups unveiled interesting implicit behaviors of online social network users.

the explicit and the implicit

One of these behaviors consisted in that a given user employed facebook.com's messaging system to communicate with the same recipient he has just emailed one minute ago. This modality of "branded" email struck us. Beyond pure use, and despite a clunkier usability than regular email, there seemed to be a lot of hidden meaning.

From an elements-of-communication perspective, it seems that context plays an important role. Facebook, as the context in which this communication happens, has managed to create a new interaction space with its own rules.

In its form of "branded" messaging, the content of a facebook message can potentially be the same as in a traditional email. The channel itself, although clunkier, is technically similar to that of email. Nevertheless a facebook message serves different purposes, and can have different recipients than those of conventional email. Your friends tell you certain things over facebook and other things over email. People who would not email you, contact you via facebook messages. Maybe it is perceived as less intrusive?. Regarding time, my view is that facebook messaging is also perceived as more asynchronous, i.e. less aggressive, than email.

From a marketing point of view this case constitutes a great example of differentiation. Differentiation enabled by the facebook brand and the context it creates, but driven by user behavior. Fascinating.