A Social Marketing Plan Starts With "Social"

I came across an interesting post this morning: "How To Build a Social Marketing Plan."

It didn't get off to a great start. The following are the first six steps:

1. Start small
2. Define your market objective
3. Select your target market
4. Assess your current web capability
5. Set a strategy
6. Measure your engagement

In short, this advice comes straight from the desk of Captain Obvious. What professional marketing plan wouldn't include these elements?

It gets better, though. The following are included under the header "Important advice" (and is good enough to quote in full):

• Pay attention to your customers -- don't just sell. Traditional marketing has all been one way. A company decides what messages it wants to project on its market and it broadcasts those messages out via an ad or press release. But new word-of-mouth tools are two-way media and they offer the remarkable advantage of a real conversation. Listen to your market, take into account what they have to say, and you will have a very loyal set of customers.
• Content is king. Content is critical with any of the new word-of-mouth tools. What you offer must be relevant, interesting, and authentic and designed to bring readers back. Add new content often. Remember that when content is not updated, readership will drop off, often rather precipitously. Make certain that your content (or comments) add value and aren’t just to self promote. If they are, they will stand out as such and you may regret it.
• Give to get, but mostly give. If there is one truism in using any of the new word-of-mouth tools, it is that you must give to get – and give generously. On a group at Facebook, be the one who answers the question or provides the help and advice. Your generosity will earn you visibility in the group and give you credibility.

These three points are critical, and they're usually the elements that marketers forget. When you attempt to market through social networks, you are crashing a party. The people at that party were already having a good time when you showed up, uninvited. They're not going to take kindly to you blasting them with a self-interested, top-down message that reeks of insincerity.

Social networking is a conversation. If you market through these channels, you need to join the conversation and respect your customers as equals within the relationship. More than that, you can't ask them to give you something (their money, their attention, their regard) until you've offered them something equal or greater in value in return.

As Microsoft would say, welcome to the social. Social marketing is a conversation and a transaction. The prospect is challenging, a little frightening, and (if you're in the right line of work) deeply exhilarating.

Ads and Social Networking Sites Go Together Like Orange Juice and Toothpaste

Which is to say, people hate that combo. I came across a useful summary to that effect this morning:

Social Networking Sites and Advertising

Here's a summary for those of you who are too busy to, you know, read:

• Consumers have a very low tolerance for online ads
• 29.9% of visitors surveyed will immediately leave a site they see as cluttered with ads
• Ads on social networking sites result in substantially fewer click-throughs, and even those who do click are less likely to make a purchase
• Don't even think about charging customers for an ad-free site; they like that idea even less.

So what's to be done if you're running a social networking site? Frankly, there only appear to be three options (only one of which is good):

1. Hope that your cash in the bank is enough to tide you over until advertisers are willing to pay a lot more for click-throughs (or until some marketing genius develops a much more clickable banner ad)
2. Get really smart, really quickly, about contextually targeting your ad inventory to your visitors
3. Forget about the idea of monetizing social networking, and figure out how to make that a side-project to your core business of selling something else
   

Overall, #3 has the best chance of success. At the very least, it's less dependent on brilliant flashes of insight; those things are great when you have them, but "we'll figure it out later" is a poor excuse for a business model (are you listening, Twitter?).

The bottom line in this scenario is not everything can be monetized. There are times in every person's life when you have your wallet out, and other times when you're simply not interested in spending money. Successful online businesses are likely to be the ones whose services most closely align with those "wallet-out" moments. Social networking sites are trying to swim against that tide, and will continue to do so as long as they're exclusively focused on social networking.

Looking into my crystal ball, here's what I forecast for Web 3.0: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Friendfeed, etc.: they will all go away (at least in their current forms). In their place will be a bunch of online businesses that incorporate social networking elements by default. Web 2.0 taught us how powerful the Web could be as a social mechanism, but it was a stop along the way, not a destination.

Social Networking Bigger Than Porn?

Over the weekend I came across an eye-catching headline: 

"Porn Passed Over as Web Users Become Social."

The article refers to recent research of Internet search activity that shows social networking eclipsing porn as the #1 thing people are looking for. It used to be that porn accounted for 20% of all activity online, but now this study suggests that it has fallen to 10%, and instead people are now searching for ways to connect with other people.

That lends itself to some heart-warming conclusions about people gravitating towards true friendship and away from empty connections, but there are likely a few things going on here. First, as the article points out, the decline in porn activity is deceptive: a drop from 20% a decade ago to 10% today may actually represent an increase in real numbers, given the overall growth of Internet usage in that period. Porn is well-known as an early adopter phenomenon; if you like porn, and you find out about a new, efficient delivery device, there's a good chance you'll buy a computer and a modem and check it out. For that reason, porn hounds were probably disproportionately represented on the early Internet.

Second, the author's  conclusion that young people today are too busy socializing to consume porn is probably a false dichotomy. Young people today grew up interacting with their friends via electronic media; ten years ago my niece was already busy after school using instant messaging to chat with her real-world friends. Now, as they enter their  twenties, they're carrying the same expectations onto the web. It's not that they're coming online and looking for something to do, then choosing between porn or social networking. Rather they're coming online with a predetermined idea of what to do, and social networking just happens to be that activity. 

Still, it's nice to see something taking precedence over porn in the online sphere. That's been the dirty little secret of the online marketplace for more than a decade now. It's high time that porn take its rightful place along the Internet's margins.

You Are What You Drink - Which Makes Me Schizophrenic

By way of Techcrunch, I discovered a new social networking site this morning: Cocktailmatch.com.

The basic premise of Cocktailmatch is that you are what you drink, and that you like to associate with people who drink the same thing. Wine drinkers, in short,  would rather not hang out with whiskey drinkers, and guys who do tequila shots are most definitely not interested in those who like pina coladas (and getting caught in the rain). 

Then there's me: I drink wine at home, sometimes order beer with spicy food in a restaurant, and enjoy mojitos on special occasions. My friends and associates include wine snobs, beer dudes, and mixed-drink swillers. Apparently I'm the exception to Cocktailmatch's rule.

Or maybe it's simply self-selecting: perhaps the desired demographic for Cocktailmatch consists of those people who identify strongly with one, and only one, type of alcohol. In which case, those people finally have a website devoted exclusively to them. For the rest of us, Cocktailmatch seems like nothing more than an odd twist on the social networking scene.

Facebook Relying on the Money Fairies

Interesting interview with Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer:

Facebook's Sandberg: Growth before monetization

Anyone who was working in the industry in 1998 or '99 should already be familiar with this sort of business plan:

"Our focus is on growth--we believe this is the moment people are joining social networks. Then it's monetization to support that growth."

In other words, do your thing, grow as fast as possible, and let the money take care of itself. Because that method worked so well for companies like Pets.com.

It's easy for me to sit here and point fingers. Monetizing web traffic has been a problem for as long as there's been web traffic, and finding a way to extract profit out of social interaction (without so tarnishing the experience that you drive your members away) is simply a tough nut to crack. To Facebook's credit, they seem to be focusing on advertising that promotes brand awareness, rather than direct product sales, and that's likely to be much less intrusive than most of the alternatives. Their goal should definitely be to avoid the hard-sell, "click here now!" approach that would quickly spoil the experience.

So, let's run down a few monetization possibilities for Facebook, and sites like it:

1. The magazine model. Magazines and websites have a similar problem: they need to find a way to make money off of people who -- at the moment of engaging with their product -- are not interested in buying something. Magazines have long made a practice of putting glossy ads between their stories; no one spends much time on those ads, but advertisers still value the exposure and are willing to pay for it. Pro: a proven business model. Con: magazines also charge a subscription fee, and most people still think the web should be free.


2. The drug dealer model (i.e. "the first taste is free"). Also known as the tiered service plan. Give away basic services, but charge for the premium plan. ESPN.com has been profitable for years with just this model. Pro: you don't need to convert everyone to a paying customer, just a sufficient percentage. Con: If a group of friends ends up with your pay wall dividing them, they're not going to enjoy the experience.


3. The singles bar model. Invite people over to interact with each other, and sell something that, like booze, enhances the experience. Conceivably Facebook could develop a set of premium widgets that makes the Facebook experience more fun and rewarding. Pro: Similar to the tiered model, except you're not (necessarily) dividing your members into two camps. Con: one mojito tends to lead to another, but a customer is only going to buy your widget once.

Sites like Facebook and MySpace, of course, have a unique challenge: all their eggs are in the social networking basket, so they need to make that one activity profitable. For now, at least, the better business model might be to approach social networking as an adjunct to an already-profitable business model. If you already make a living selling cars or computers, and your primary goal is to increase customer satisfaction and brand loyalty, social networking is an excellent means of approaching that goal. If, however, social networking is the only product you have to offer, get thinking, because if there's one thing we learned in Y2K, it's that growth in and of itself is not a business plan.