Today I was quoted in a nice article on the Chicago Tribune (free login required), called:
Ad Buyers Beware: Google’s billion-dollar deal for YouTube.com carries lots of risk, especially if it plans to incorporate ads into the video site. Such an abrupt change could prove annoying to users.
What I like about tech columnist Eric Benderoff is a real sensitivity to user experience issues/annoyances, not just gloating over the power moves of media execs like so many industry writers. Eric’s central question was: “Can home movies, personal photos and pithy commentaries — known as user-generated content at Internet social sites — successfully coexist with advertising?”
The answer depends on looking at marketing in these spaces in new and creative, user-centered ways that create functional value for the user base. My axe to grind was the latest naive perception from many marketers that users are hanging out in social networks just waiting to be advertised to and monetized! I noted that social networks like MySpace and Facebook are creating organically grown affinity groups, formed BY users FOR users:
“Social networking sites are not the place for marketers to be intrusive,” [MacQueen] said. “These communities are there for people to network for the common good, not to be marketing bait. They are not loyal to the social networking site, they are loyal to their friends.”
Users hang out in online social networks to do what they’ve always done as teens and young adults in the real world: hang out with likeminded friends, try on different identities, and work a social agenda. The sites that marketers create for these users are becoming less and less relevant to their interests. More importantly old mass-media advertising techniques are largely irrelevant to them in these shared, social media spaces. I argue that user-centered Marketing is a significant shift from brand messaging to finding ways to solve a customer problem to help – or up the social currency being traded on social networks. It’s a different way to provide value and be relevant, and it requires a deeper understanding of user mindsets, motivations and tasks.
“The old mass marketing model, which is pushing the message out to a passive group of sheep,” doesn’t work for these sites, MacQueen said. Rather, the marketing, like the interaction among users of the site, needs to be “more one-on-one,” he said.
“It’s user-centered marketing. You have to look at a customer need or problem, and then have the brand give the customer what he wants.”
MacQueen said Helio, a mobile phone company, has the right idea.
“They are offering an experience that is unique. You can publish the photos you take with your phone right on your MySpace page,” he said. “Helio figured out that the social currency on MySpace is through sharing media with other friends.”
MacQueen called this marketing as a service, not pushing a product.
I’ve been working with Helio on a mobile User Experience Strategy this year. In the spring their now legendary founder Sky Dayton (of Earthlink fame) inked a deal with MySpace – not content to just be an advertiser, but to actually offer functionality exclusive to Helio for 6 months that make the mobile experience superior to anything else currently on the market. Back in February Dayton said:
“What our target really cares about, this young consumer, is being connected to their friends and being connected to their world,” Dayton said, contrasting Helio’s idea to that of the major carriers, who are expanding sales of music, videos and games.
Helio has a very defined, young and tech-savy target for their mobile devices, so it’s a good strategy for them. (Worth noting: Helio’s move also generated a lot of press just on strategy alone.) We helped them create user experiences that seamlessly integrate the functionalty on their mobile handsets with the social networks they run in, right down to the user flows of the mobile application. The value was in the differentiated, user-centerd service they offered, not the mere advertising of their product.
0 Responses to “Social Networking Users ≠ Marketing Bait”