3 Priorities to Understand the Value of Friends and Followers

As we try to put a number on the value of word of mouth online, we need to try and do three things:

1. Figure out how to market to someone's social graph
If I buy a Neuton Lawnmower (I did) are my friends on facebook more likely to click on advertising for Neuton? Business Week covers this in their article on "What's A Friend Worth." Amongst other things they cover research from a couple of years back where the people in someone's chat list who clicked on an ad were 3 times more likely to click on the ad. Isn't this part of the promise of social network advertising? Clearly, Facebook, MySpace and the other social nets are hard at work trying to make these connections for marketers  Which brings us to the second point. 

2. Understand the effectiveness of advertising in proximity to true earned media
When I blog about how great the Neuton is (my wife says it's a much better mower than our previous electric) and someone sees that post and sees some advertising either on my blog, Facebook page or somewhere else on their online journey, are they more likely to click on that ad? The simple answer is yes. What I cannot say is whether it would be a simple 3x, 10x or 20x improvement. Stephen Baker who wrote the BW article, tells about Cameron Marlow's research for Facebook that dissects the degrees of friendship - essentially saying that for a typical user with 500 friends they are likely to only proactively communicate with 20 of them and keep in close touch with 10. We are working on understanding this better and I know others are as well. Here's a great chart from Cameron's blog that breaksdown this idea of maintained relationships:

Now, I used to think this focus on advertising amidst the "earned" world of social media was kind of beside the point. I believe that the true power of social media is the amplification of word of mouth - authentic positive opinion. Lately, I am getting a little discouraged at the over-use of bloggers by marketers. Influential bloggers are growing weary of outreach that leaves them with a case of herbal tea to try and chat about. Marketers are looking at ways to scale their outreach adn some are crossing the line to paying bloggers or offering such consistent rewards that they are producing paid media not WOM. Problem is that even with full disclosure how can a consumer distinguish? It's going to be up to us as marcom professionals to know when a brand is really likely to inspire a groundswell of WOM and when it's just not. Which brings me to point three:

3. Distinguish between those products/services that lend themselves to true, organic word of mouth and those that need a more integrated approach (WOM + Advertising)

We're going to have to dial back on the blogger outreach. It's like traffic in Sao Paulo (there this week for digital influence training, client meetings and talks) - in a few years traffic planners fear there will be so many cars that the thruways will literally come to a frozen stop one day. In the case of blogger outreach, overuse will lead to a meltdown of trust, one of the things that puts social media above traditional paid marketing. We will need to trun our attention to complex integrated programs that perserve the authenticity of social media-delivered opinion by combining it with clearly distinguishable and highly-relevant advertising.

Social media marketing will continue to get more complex.It's future is in integrated programs that mix the enthusiasm of happy, even delighted, customers and the reach and relevance of targeted marketing.

Comments

[Vasant Kumar]

Brilliantly curated post. Bravo - it gave me fascinating insights as I went through a whole range of links from your posting to articles to further links from those articles! Thanks

[AliSwi]

We obviously value the opinions of people that we know and those opinions can lend a great deal of credibility to a product or service. Even if someone is not looking to make a present purchase, there is clearly value in people sharing their positive consumer experiences and contributing to brand recognition. The key question is – how do you encourage customers to share their experiences through social media outlets?