How We Work : Blog

The statistics on social networks are fascinating: My Space alone drives 2% of traffic to shopping and classified sites. Financial, travel and communication sites are all seeing traffic growth from social networking sites. The research shows that social networkers are more likely to rely on peer reviews and word of mouth than on the latest ad campaign and they spend 25% of their income online (vs 17% for non networkers).

For marketers, traditional online advertising within social networks has proven to be wanting. Integrated strategies through branded micro-sites, peer reviews and forums are the tools showing results.

Marketers are slowly but surely are moving into niche marketing, within the suburbs of the social networks. While this sounds good, (especially in Asia) marketers will need to grapple with a plethora of issues both within their organizations and the new consumers they market to. Within the organization, they will have to deal with possibly conflicting marketing initiatives, logistics issues and stakeholders who want to see more immediate results (For the corporate cat: a print ad in a leading paper is probably easier to comprehend than your product persona’s having 8,000 friends on My Space). With consumers, marketers will need to be prepared take feedback head-on and work out how to work with and reward buzz generators while helping them maintain their credibility.

It is going to be exciting to see how marketers navigate this new space. I’m expecting new technology and measurement tools to emerge that will help marketers justify and execute their strategies in this area.

Have a great weekend ahead!