Social Promotion, the best of display and social media

If social media marketing is a panacea to online marketing (as many experts claim), why are advertising dollars continuing to flow into online display and search advertising? Social media certainly gets most of the attention, but display and search are still raking in most of the money. The reason is that display and search offer important advantages over social media.

Three Advantages of Display and Search

1. Measurable. Display and search advertising is precisely measurable. ROI is predictable and therefore manageable. And while there are numerous tools that help advertisers monitor social media conversation, they still lack the ability to define a clear relationship between investment (time & money) and results.

2. Earned. The other advantage of display and search is that it is “earned” instead of “paid.” This is related to ROI but more importantly it allows the advertiser to mitigate risk by only paying for performance measured by end-user action. Social media marketing initiatives require investments of time and money on the front end. If the campaign fails to yield any results the advertiser doesn’t get the money back they spent to create the campaign.

3. Simple. Display and Search is also relatively simple to manage and define. The organic nature of social media makes the advertisers task complicated because it changes so rapidly. There are so many conversations, so many mediums and such little time to manage it all.

Social Promotion offers the best of both worlds

The downside of display and search advertising is that online users are more and more focused on the conversation taking place in social media and less on the advertisements placed on the periphery. Social promotion services offer (yes 6Dcast is one of them) a simple way to bring the advertisement into the conversation while maintaining the advantages listed above.

It seems nearly everyone working in marketing today is focused on how to use Social Media to make their message more viral, more relevant and more accessible. For many its still a leap of faith because its hard to measure and manage all that is taking place across social networks.

With social promotion an advertiser can create display type campaigns with common metrics such as pay-per-click but still retain the viral effectiveness they want from social media.

Social promotion and the collective celebrity

Social promotion is the result of an old advertising idea being democratized by social technology. Social promotion is simply incentivizing individuals to endorse and talk about a product or service via social media . Celebrity endorsements are nothing new. Just turn on the television and its hard to ignore how many products and services are being promoted by familiar personalities.

Of course, these celebrities are paid by advertisers in hopes that the endorsement will lead to more people purchasing the product the celebrity is promoting. Why does this work? Because the people watching the commercial are likely to identify with, trust or want to be more like the celebrity on a sufficiently large enough scale to warrant the cost of the commercial. They have influence and reach, so paying for them to appear on a TV commercial works.

In a sense social media enables any individual today to become their own mini-celebrity. While individual social media users may not have the reach of someone like Ashton Kutcher, many of them have the same if not greater level of influence on the people they can reach in their network. If enough mini-celebrities (individual social media users) come together to “endorse” a message, the sum of their collective efforts could dwarf even the most recognized celebrities.

Social promotion assumes that paid influence will continue to work online the same way it has always worked offline. The only difference is that online we can all be “celebrities.”

Viral Seeding might make the difference

In Part I on Viral Seeding I introduced the notion that spectacular content doesn’t always equate to viral marketing success. To understand what will succeed it is important to not only understand why some ideas spread but to also understand how they spread. At risk of being completely un-original, let me reference the book Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. His analysis boils down the forces behind epidemics into three factors:

1. Stickiness
2. Power of Context
3. The Law of the Few

The first two factors are the reasons why an idea spreads, and the “Law of the Few” refers to how an idea spreads. The “Few” in his “Law” refers to the conclusion he reaches that epidemics occur, surprisingly, as a result of only a handful of people. He calls these people connectors and mavens. The emphasis is on quality instead of quantity of people spreading the idea.

Viral success is a result of a campaign’s content jumping across networks of people. This is the reason a company’s existing network of friends, fans and followers may not have what it takes to achieve success, even if the base is relatively large. Having a large population of people you can tap is certainly better than not having one at all, but it might not be as useful if that group is homogenous with many redundant connections and few people actively engaged with other networks.

Whether or not a company already has a large social media presence, viral seeding is a great way to insure success by increasing the potential the message jumps across many networks. Here are some thoughts on how you might be able to improve your viral campaigns:

1. Include Earned Advertising (Search and Banner) in your viral campaign strategy. Think of your ROI in terms of the money you spend on producing the content as well as some advertising dollars to properly seed it to various parts of the web.
2. Identify the connectors and the mavens in and outside of your existing network. There are a number of new services that rate social media influence by individual user. Popular bloggers also have a lot of sway. Once you identify the movers and shakers motivate them and support them.
3. Don’t just focus on your preferred social media outlet. Yes, Facebook is huge but as everyone flocks to market themselves there it may create even better opportunities in other areas such as on social bookmarking sites like Digg (RIP Delicious) or emerging networks like Foursquare and Quora.