I'm at the Graphing Social Patterns conference in San Jose for the next two days. I'll covering the event for Read/WriteWeb and doing a few interviews on Read/WriteTalk.
This morning Charlene Li from Forrester Research gave a presentation entitled 'Big Brands & Facebook: Marketing Case Studies & Best Practices.' The theme that she came back to a few times was: Facebook marketing requires communication not advertising.
Assuming that advertising means 'interruption', I think anyone who has been using Facebook for anytime would agree with that assumption. Some of the implications around best practices were quite interesting, so in this post we'll explore those.
Charlene's goal was to encourage the audience and advertisers (who didn't seem to be many in the audience) to think beyond traditional advertising. She started by establishing different appraoches to advertising on the Facebook platform. Specifically she outlined three approaches to buying advertising on Facebook:
Going back to Charlene's opening theme of communicating and not advertising, she revisited the statement and started exploring effective ways to communicate. She specifically talked about Sponsored Groups. For clarification, while anyone can create a Facebook Group, the sponsored groups provide additional functionality including:
As an example, the screen shot below is the Jeep Sponsored Group on Facebook.
Charlene laid out five best practices for sponsored groups:
For perspective, while this is certainly a compelling way to communicate with users, it's important to realize that only large brands and companies are able to afford creating sponsored groups. According to Charlene, the costs are usually in the six figures for a three month engagement. However, any company can setup a traditional group for no cost at all. For example, here is a link to the Read/WriteWeb Facebook Group.
Charlene also touched on branded applications, although in her opinion there weren't any good case studies yet. Someone in the audience asked: "What is a good example of a facebook app that is true to its brand?" Charlene answered: "None, I keep waiting but there is a long way to go."
It was repeated a number of times today that it's the 'Summer of Facebook' (see Dan Farber's post). As the community continues to discuss new opportunities for building on top of the social platform of Facebook, it's important to realize that involving big brands will be crucial. Hopefully, some of these best practices will be helpful for not just the brands looking to engage, but also all of the developers looking to build those experiences.
Note: Charlene Li photo credit B D Solis Flickr
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all Read/WriteWeb posts
"...Advertising will never add value to customers. Its goal is to persuade or affect emotional response. It has its place. But let’s not try to disguise advertising as conversation by giving it the moniker of communication. Advertising and conversations both warrant a paragraph in the marketing strategy. Heck, place ads on your social network group or blog if you want to. Just don’t air brush them to the point that the line between advertising and conversations becomes faded..."
For more on my take, read:
Communication, Conversations and Advertising
http://www.messagingtimes.com/blog/?p=1178
All the best
Tom
Posted by: Tom O'Leary | October 9, 2007 11:36 AMIn response to Tom O'Leary. As someone who works in the online ad industry I often hear views like yours. They are usually forced upon me by ad-industry dinosaurs who don't understand that the online world is not just another silo sitting next to TV/radio/print/DM.
Online it's not about advertising versus conversations, it's about rethinking the role and application of advertising. With the data people constantly offer up about themselves online, advertising should then ultimately become a service, not a persuasive intrusion.
Nic.
Posted by: Nic Hodges | October 9, 2007 7:28 PMDon't know - sounds a bit rhetorical to me Nic, unless the objective of advertising has changed somehow in the past couple of years. Certainly, the Internet has changed the shape of advertising (i.e. paid search results, behavioral emails, etc.) But in the end, the result is the same - serving up ads.
Now if advertisers were truly interested in providing advertising as a service, they could host platforms (or social network groups) that contained objective, comparative discussions, reviews and best value searches for products and services related to those they represent - even if that means that a competitive product or service appears on the platform if the price is lower or if it has a higher independent rating.
Unfortunately for consumers, some online advertisers disguise their presence as relevant content (It wasn't too long ago when this blog and others came under fire, perhaps unfairly, for blurring the line between advertising and content.) Hanging around conversations is not the same as taking part in them. I think that rather than redefining the definition of advertising to suit the medium, we just have to accept that there are many ways to communicate with an audience today. Advertising to them is one way. But it's not an either or situation. Actually investing the time to take part in industry conversations, providing objective information about a product or service and creating truly valuable solutions that people talk about are also effective ways to get an audience to take notice.
Just because I have data about myself online doesn't mean that I am interested in advertising that might be relevant to me based on some adserver algorithm. It's all intrusive unless I, as the consumer choose to consume it.
Can't wait to see the creative for this year's Super Bowl. Hopefully, we'll see something dramatically different, both offline and on.
Posted by: Tom O'Leary | October 10, 2007 11:22 AM