Writing a new page in the online book: the real opportunity in social media

17 April 2009

Brands are starting to realise that social media is about more than MySpace, Bebo and Facebook. While the creation of Facebook pages or brand-led MySpace pages do have a value in the marketing mix, it is the comments, actions and opinions of consumers online that is the insight that brands want to uncover and utilise.

A recent joint study by MySpace and British independent digital media agency i-level found that 40% of users who engage with a brand on a social network remember it when shopping on the high street or online. That is a very compelling statistic.

Facebook Connect, the social network’s next big platform that allows social interaction from the network to be harnessed by third party sites, will help advertisers gain valuable insight into a users’ activities. “Understanding how people are behaving and how they react to things will allow advertisers to add real value to the user,” explains Trevor Johnson, market development EMEA, Facebook. “Advertising through Connect is not quite there yet, but there is the possibility to adopt context-based ad models in the future.”

While Facebook grapples with the best way to use consumer data to optimise advertising experience, while also being sensitive to privacy issues, other companies are helping advertisers leverage the social graph to supercharge their online advertising efforts.

Amplify describes itself as ‘the meaning platform’. The company analyses web content and returns its meaning in a usable and actionable structure that can be plugged into other web technologies, such as ad servers. This enables advertisers, publishers and networks to gain increased brand safety, targeting and SEO online.

Its first customer is Lotame, a US behavioural targeting firm that specialises in social media. Amplify is ‘reading’ posted content on these sites and then feeding the information into the Lotame targeting system, so it can provide a more accurate picture of who the influencers are within the social media sites and what they are saying, to deliver more effective advertising to its own clients.

“The things that people say are the most valuable data you can get in any kind of marketing,” says Mark Redgrave, founder and chief executive at Amplify. “The sheer volume of conversations now taking place online is massive and using human methods to monitor this is not possible. Our technology is not foolproof, but we can cover so much
more of the social conversation.”

As well as providing better targeting of consumers in social media environments, Amplify and similar ‘natural language’ systems can also provide effective brand protection services – ensuring that advertising is never served alongside user-generated content that the brand would find unacceptable or indeed hostile.

However, while currently being used by brands to ensure their banner ads don’t pop up in inappropriate places, this technology will eventually power the deeper understanding of consumer-generated content which will lead to more immersible social advertising. “Brands and agencies are talking a lot about brand engagement, but you need to understand what is being said if you want to engage in a deep and meaningful way,” says Redgrave.

Universal McCann is one agency that is hoping to drive deeper brand engagement for clients in the social space. Its Social Media Tracker, now in its fourth iteration and due to be revealed exclusively at the Festival of Media, has become an industry benchmark for how the social graph is developing. The agency is also increasing the sophistication of its use of social media tracking tools in order to understand the context of conversations taking place online.

“Our tools allow us to see what content is being added to what sites, so we can change the advertising mix and targeting for a client, as well as the weighting and type of creative used in those ads,” says Rick Corteville, head
of digital, EMEA at Universal McCann. These social media tracking tools are increasingly being used together with
behavioural targeting ones to gain a deeper understanding of consumers’ journeys online, not only when they are purchasing but when they are researching too.

“If we can get a better picture of their journey we can message appropriately to new prospects as well as existing customers,” comments Corteville.

Mixing cookie tracking-based behavioural targeting with technology that allows a better understanding of social interactions is rapidly becoming the future of online advertising. Crucially for advertisers, it is driving better cost efficiencies and targeting on the back of the rich flow of data being produced by consumer journeys online.

The MySpace/i-level research also revealed that savvy users now expect a particular level of interaction from brands, with 22% saying that they are likely to spend more money with an advertiser if they have engaged with it in a social networking context. “This is people talking about your brand or service,” says Alex Miller, head of Jam, i-level’s social media unit. “We are beginning to work with clients at a very senior director level and it is these conversations where we are seeing the dots being joined up at a strategic level.”

This is preferable to talking at a more junior level, to those on the client media teams, adds Miller, as they can’t join up the dots that link social media with the ability to supercharge the overall marketing plan. Instead they use it in isolation to deliver advertising into the social environment.

“Social media is not being used in the right way by many brands and will be less effective than other forms of online advertising if you just take a banner ad approach,” says Miller. “But if you work out how to listen and join in the conversation, it can inform your product strategy, research and development and all parts of your business.”

Jam has recently worked with Absolute Radio in the UK on a social media campaign that identified its target ‘rock music’ audience using social media tools before then adding value to those conversations that were already taking place. It created a ‘top 10’ playlist social media app and encouraged different music forums to compete against each other to vote for the most popular. The campaign generated more than 50,000 participants and 14,000 inbound links to the Absolute Radio site. This bolstered the brand’s search positioning in the natural rankings at a much lower cost than a SEO overhaul of the site would have done.

Sony and Renault also work with Jam monitoring the social graph and in Sony’s case funnelling the conversation strands back into the product development team in Tokyo.

These examples show that social media has now become a vital optimisation, targeting and cost-efficient marketing tool. It has leapt out of social networks onto the wider web. Technology companies offer the ability to identify and understand consumer conversations online and then plug that data back into targeting engines, increasing effective communications.

The tracking and understanding of social media interactions is also increasing, creating a greater number of opportunities and more powerful engagement. As a result, social media has risen up the decision-maker chain within client organisations. Social media is now less about Apps, Pages and Poking and more to do with saving money on the marketing spend.
 

Greg Brooks, London