What makes a Successful Marketing Campaign on Social Networks?

Many brands are considering it, some have done it. Done what? Marketed on social networks (Facebook, Myspace, or private label social networks).

Why? Social Networks are attractive because consumers are connecting with other consumers and the trust tends to be higher. Secondly, there’s a tremendous amount of buzz from the media for this newest form of marketing. Lastly, there’s lots of folks using social networks (about 2/3rds of all North American youth use it daily, and about 1/3rd of NA adults use it as least once a month –data From Forrester Research, Q4, 2007)

[What “Makes or Breaks” a social networking campaign? Is there an attribute(s) that makes social networking marketing campaigns a success?]

Sadly, many brand are going to do it wrong, by wasting resources, or embarrassing their brand with a campaign that doesn’t fit the needs of a community. To help marketers do it right, and to save users from dealing with more bad campaigns, I’m going to do some research on the topic.

I’m a laaaazy (or is it efficient?) analyst, I use social media (what I cover) to help me with my research. Besides, the social collective is far smarter than some big headed analyst.

The following attributes are what I think are often found in successful social networking campaigns, but don’t let me be the judge, I want your input.

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Marketing Campaigns on Social Networks share the following attributes:

Meets a business objective: First and foremost, any marketing campaign or activity should match with a business objective, regardless of the tools being used.

Supports Community Goals: Every community is different, and each has unique goals (from supporting products, to each other, or to just be entertained) the campaign focus should therefore meet the needs of the community, before the needs of the marketer. Effective campaigns will first understand the core drivers, interests, and rituals of the community and learn how to meet those desires. (Expanded by Laurel Papworth)

Encourage Member Interaction: The most successful social networking campaigns and efforts involve the audience.

Quickly scale: Social networks are designed for information to quickly move from member to member, so campaigns that lean on these capabilities perform the best. These attributes known as Velocity, Viralness, and Spread are key.

Utilize Media: In some campaigns, the best way to get members to return is to offer them media. Depending on demographics and community needs, this could be audio, videos, or demos

Foster self-expression or communication: Members in social networks like to communicate with each other, or self-express. As a result, campaigns should satisfy these needs with the appropriate tools

Offer a satisfying User Experience: This encompasses the overall experience of the campaign, the content and navigation items should be where expected, the language familiar to the audience, and overall look and feel of the site appeasing.

Provide longer term utility: Successful campaigns have a longer term value, rather than a short term ‘disposble campaign”. These campaigns add value by being a useful application to the members, rather than just quick dose of entertainment.

Enhance Value as Community participants: As more people contribute or interact with the campaign, the value is increased. This can be in the form of content that is created by the community, contests, voting, or games.

Integration with other marketing activities: Successful marketing campaigns aren’t single channel, in fact they utilizie multiple channels and mediums to enhance the overall activity. The same thing applies to marketing campaigns on social networks, those that are promoted from other locations such as (corporate websites, email newsletter, blogs, podcasts) outside fo the social network have a great chance for success.

Maintain agility during the campaign: Social networks are living, breathing organisms made up of real people connecting with each other. Marketing campaigns also should share these attributes and show be flexible to change in-flight, yield to legitimate requests or complaints of the community. Those campaigns that reflect the same dynamic behavior as human interaction have a higher chance to be interacted –and accepted –by the community. (Submitted by Graham)

Company Participation: In some cases, companies that participate in the discussions or conversations will yield to a more successful marketing campaign. Activities can range from recognition, company interaction, or attention to members perhaps from a community manager (Submitted by Whitney McNamara, Esther Lim, Crimson Consulting, Warren Sukernek)

You add your attribute: Please leave a comment below, I welcome and respect your opinion. If you’re from a vendor in this space, feel free to leave your company name or email so I can properly credit you.

Trends: Corporate Adoption of Social Media: Tire, Tower, and the Wheel

Spending time with large corporations and getting to understand how they adopt social media is fascinating, recently, I’ve noticed a trend, not on public use, but on internal organization.

Unlikes Advertising (which is often controlled by a single group) Social Media is being adopted by many business groups across the enterprise, from marketing, product teams, sales, to support. While not uncommon, social media tends to be a grassroots movement that comes from the edges (where customers are) of the company, where individual users, vertical marketers, and client facing teams exist.

At least three models of social media orginization within a large corporation, which loosely resemble a tire, a tower, or a spoke model.

The Tire
Common to grassroots movements within corporations, adoption happens at the lowest levels at the company, rather than from a centralized group. You’ll see individual business units define their own strategy, pick their own tools, engage their own vendors, and communicate with the market on their own terms.

Common to companies that haven’t put a strategy in place, depending on culture, this could be detrimental as resources are not used efficiently, data is spread on multiple systems, and the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing.

The Tower
Common in organizations where power is centralized, we may see a central team formed to organize social media. This team defines the policy, best practices, vendors, and tools. This team which will commonly found in corporate communications and supported by PR will often dictate the direction of social media. Expect a dedicated role or sub-group to appear either experiential marketing, new media, or interactive media to eventually be born out of the group, where social media is centralized.

Social media is a grassroots movement, so common dangers can be gagging the natural voice of conversations of product experts with customers using these tools, so a centralized team needs to be more of a support organization to the enterprise, not a controller.

The Wheel
This coordinated model has a central organizational unit that provides best practices, sets policy, supports infrastructure but encourages conversations at the edges of the company. More about empowering business groups to partake in natural social media discussions without hindering, this group will be more of a coordinator, and less of a controller. Expect to see this model to occur as social media infiltrates every nook and cranny of a business, and at a certain point, a company as an enterprise can’t ignore the raging groundswell.

Cautions to this model, as overly coordinated programs will be difficult to achieve, and may be ineffective to different unique markets that a large company may have. Like the tower, having a centralized group at a large enterprise is always going to slow down natural conversations so focus on empowerment, rather than control.

What styles of adoption are you noticing from large companies?

The Many Challenges of Social Network Sites

In this blog, I strive to provide a balanced viewpoint of both the benefits and challenges of a web strategy, it’s easy for us to become over-hyped and then fall right into the pit of exuberance.

From white label social networks to existing social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and on, there’s been much hoopa raised. Yet, we should always remember the challenges that are facing these tools, as there are many difficulties to overcome.

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The Many Challenges of Social Networks:
Each of the following hurdles can be overcome, but first, let’s identify them.

Difficult to Monetize
Even Google says it’s having a hard time monetizing social networks, why? The use case is completely different. Members aren’t hunting for information like they do on a search, instead they are communicating with each other, and self-expressing. (We’ve data to back that up too), Bakardo agrees. How bad is bad? “Marketers say as few as 4 in 10,000 people who see their ads on social networking sites click on them”

Excess of Players
In the case of the many white label social networks (white label means you can rebrand, and create your own Facebook), there are too many players in the space. As a result, I spoke with CIO magazine and share with them our thoughts on the future of these many products. Consolidation will happen, and many will be irrelevant.

As Marketers Move In, Users Move Out
Remember Friendster? Tribe, or waay back and eCircles? Nothing is new, as communities form, marketers will move in, and in some cases bastardize the experience and the hip, cool, influencers will leave to the next network.

Untrustworthy Member Data
In many cases (I’ve seen reports of up to one-third) of users submit inaccurate information on their profile. As a result, marketing efforts will not be aimed at the right audiences, members continuing to be an elusive target.

Lack of Metrics Makes Success Hard to Measure
For many marketers who want to deploy a campaign on a social network, access to server metrics isn’t always available. As a result, they have to often visually monitor the interaction on the site, or measure click throughs to their site. In some of the more sophisticated platforms, a crude dashboard is provided.

Stalkers and Other Unwanted Activity Ruins Lives
Child stalkers in MySpace continues to be a problem, and in some cases, masking oneself as someone else is easy, and to readily fool others. As a result, one young teen committed suicide from the deception, rejection, and embarrasment from a peer’s mother.

Privacy Concerns Mount as Developers Move In
The great hoopla and community push back from the recent Beacon experiment, launching of newsfeeds, and social networks sharing too much information with third party widget developers puts members at risk, and visibly makes them uncomfortable.

Strings Attached to Membership: Difficult to Leave
According to this NYT article, leaving Facebook is difficult, there are hooks, saved accounts, and ways to continue to reconnect to the site, even after you’ve left.

Plateau or Social Network Fatigue?
I’m starting to see some reports from sources that suggest that the usage of social networks are slowing down, if not reducing perhaps it’s from the endless tasks that occur, or the shinyness has rubbed off.

Successful Networks have hard time scaling
Facebook and Twitter (yes a social network too) are suffering from scaling issues, as a result, their sites have a great deal of downtime or latency. The complicated applications will only increase in intricacy as more users are added.

Loss in workplace productivity “Social not-working”
Companies, organizations, and individuals are concerned about the time wasted in managing social network profiles, in some cases, companies have banned Facebook from their employees, often using Firewalls. (submitted by Beth Kanter and David Mitchell in comments)

Got others? leave a comment
If you’ve got one that I missed, I may add it here and credit you.