The Birth of Social Network Marketing
In the 1970’s, a phenomenon called Social Marketing was born. This refers to the use of marketing to sell ideas instead of products and services. Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman define it as:
Differing from other areas of marketing only with respect to the objectives of the marketer and his or her organization. Social marketing seeks to influence social behaviors not to benefit the marketer, but to benefit the target audience and the general society.
In the mid-2000s, another unrelated phenomenon emerged and was popularized by the likes Linkedin, Friendster and MySpace. This is called Social Networking. Social Networking allows communities to be built using a network of relationships between its members. This is basically an Internet implementation of the saying, “the friend of my friend is my friend”.
Now things are moving full circle, marketers are not selling both products and ideas on social networks. I would like to call this Social Network Marketing. Social Network Marketing is basically the use of social networks as a marketing tool to sell both products and ideas. Part of the BusinessWorld article states that:
The researcher estimates that marketers will spend $280 million on social network advertising in the U.S. this year, about 1.7% of the projected $16.7 billion due to be spent on U.S. online advertising in 2006. The social networking ad tally will reach $1.9 billion in 2010, making up 6.3% of the total.
This is not much, yet. But because of the nature and recent successes of major brands like Chase and Burger King on the Social Network Marketing space, this is poised to grow significantly. The probable reason these campaigns are so effect is that they do not come across as just pushing products. Hard sells - “Think in-your-face marketing”. If this is what marketers want the easiest solution would be to buy advertising space on social networking sites. However, that is simply good-ole-fashion marketing. In order to be a Social Network Marketer, a community must first be built. Multiple methods can be employed to build this community from direct rewards to coolness appeal. The coolness appeal is the ability of a social network member to attract other social network members to be friends or associate with them by intangible means. This is built by selling ideas. In the case of Burger King, being friends with the King is made to appear cool. So, the idea of being friends with the King is cool. This alone does wonders to the brand. The next step would be to push specific and target campaigns on your “friends”. Now, this takes a page off the Direct Marketing book. Anything from this point is easy. It is the idea that is hard to sell. Mindshare is hard to sell.
As the article also notes, this type of marketing can potentially backfire. Therefore, advertisers and marketers are taking extra-care with this new media. However, the future looks bright for Social Network Marketing.
