IMV14 : Social Networks

The following is a transcript for IMV14 : Social Networks. The original podcast is located here.

Announcer:

Welcome to the Internet Marketing Voodoo podcast brought to you by MindComet. And now, here's your host, Ted Murphy.

Ted Murphy:

Welcome to Internet Marketing Voodoo, Episode 14. I’m your host, Ted Murphy and with me today is Debra Aho Williamson. Debra is a senior analyst at eMarkter. Welcome to the show today Debra.

Debra Williamson:

Thanks. Thanks for having me Ted.

Ted Murphy:

Debra we’re here to talk today about social networks as marketing vehicles. And I know that this is something that you’ve spent some time researching in the past and we’re very happy to have you on the show to talk about it.

Debra Williamson:

Great, great it’s definitely a hot topic. That’s for sure.

Ted Murphy:

Oh yes. Who are the major players right now as far as online communities in the social network scale?

Debra Williamson:

I think that everybody has noticed the phenomenon of MySpace and if they haven’t maybe they’ve been living underneath a rock or something like that. You know MySpace has rocketed from practically nowhere to become one of the top sites on the Internet. If you look at the data according to comScore Media Metrix as of March 2006 MySpace received 41.9 million users. That’s up even from previous months of February which was 37.3 million unique visitors. It’s got a huge audience. In addition, comScore reported that MySpace was the number two site in page views behind only Yahoo and that is absolutely huge. If you look at the next most popular site it’d probably be Facebook. It’s very popular among students, college students and high school students. It doesn’t quite have the number of users that MySpace would have, but when you look at the page views it ranks really, really high. It was seventh in the number of page views as of March. Of course there’s other sites as well, there’s Xanga, ConnectU and of course there’s the, you know kind of the first generation of Friendsters. But clearly, clearly MySpace is the king of all social networking sites.

Ted Murphy:

Yeah obviously with the acquisition by Fox last year, I think that was what for $480 million dollars and I know that’s Facebook is on the block now for, they’re asking for about $2 billion dollars. So obviously there’s some money in it.

Debra Williamson:

Yeah, you’d like to think so. Yeah I think when NewsCorp. made that acquisition I believe the figure was $580 million and the word that had gone around was Facebook was a figure of $2 billion, which I think they since sort of backed away from and said, oh no, no we, you know we were never really for sale. You know, who knows. Maybe it was just a ploy to get some attention in the press. But either way, it clearly paid off and Facebook’s definitely gotten a lot more buzz in the past couple of weeks.

Ted Murphy:

So why are so many students logging onto these sites?

Debra Williamson:

Students today are networked, you know in all senses of the word. They, you know on the computer, music networks, mobile phone networks, text messaging, instant messaging, I mean using a network and then by extension using a social network is really an extension of their social lives. It’s a way of communicating. It’s a way of keeping in touch with their friends and amazingly enough to me college students that we talked to and I talked to when I my research report a few months back, that students said it’s actually easier to post a message on someone’s page than to email them. So they’re really turning this social networking into a whole new way of communicating with each other. They think email is too slow because their friends don’t check their email enough. But they’re constantly on their MySpace or their Facebook page. I think that those sites are particularly appealing to young people. Because they spend so much time, they update their own pages. They visit their friends’ pages. They get into contests to see how many friends they can acquire. To me it seems like it’s almost a social life on steroids where your popularity is measured not by how many real friends you have but about how many virtual ones you have.

Ted Murphy:

And of course in real life we’re not counting in the same way are we?

Debra Williamson:

No.

Ted Murphy:

No number saying how many friends you have that’s like posted on your shirt.

Debra Williamson:

People do get into games. You know how many friends can you simulate in a month or in a week? And it’s a game of you know how many people can you get to sign up. You don’t even know these people but they’re, you know they’re “friends.” Certainly in the real world, I would think people would have a lot fewer friends.

Ted Murphy:

So how are advertisers and marketers using social networks? And what kind of reach do you think they’ll see?

Debra Williamson:

Seems like every marketer in the world wants to figure out how to tap into social networking. I was just at ad:tech this past week in San Francisco and the session of social networking was standing room only. There had to have been 150 maybe even 200 people trying to cram into that room to listen to the executives from these social networking sites talk about how to reach their audience online. So it’s clearly on top of minds of marketers to figure it out. And you’re starting to see some things, a lot of the first steps that marketers take are to create their own profile pages, to actually make a page about themselves on MySpace or Facebook and then use those pages as marketing vehicles. If you look at a company like Dell Computers they have a page on MySpace that they call the Dell DJ Ditty for the Ditty Music Player that Dell markets. And Dell doesn’t hide that this is advertising and doesn’t try to pretend that it’s an actual person. There are a bunch of funny videos that you can download and the whole theme of it is around this overweight “former band impresario.” It’s really strange but I guess it appeals to young people, you know. But you know it’s accumulated a lot of friends.

Same thing for Aquafina the water company, they sponsor a section of MySpace dedicated to independent and new filmmakers and if you go to Aquafina profile on MySpace they’ve garnered more than 16,000 friends, you know people who actually sign up and say, yeah I want to be part of your network and I want to comment. And there’s all these comments on there about oh how much I love your water and how I use the water. And so the marketer is making a real connection with so many people. And there are things like you know, video ads, not to keep going back to MySpace but they seem to be the biggest place around these days for advertising. MySpace’s game section has a space where advertisers can run video ads. ABC Family Network actually runs video ads on the MySpace game section and then other gaming companies have as well. Even H&R Block had a banner ad on MySpace. So you know what you might consider one of the more stodgy companies around clearly has found it’s way into you know one of the hottest things among young people today.

Ted Murphy:

So in your experience do these videos and these ads and these profiles are they making good marketing vehicles? Is it worth the time and effort involved?

Debra Williamson:

It’s very, very early in the game. And that’s kind of the big question here. And they’re a couple of angles to think about and I think each one sort of had its own pros and cons, from a reach perspective absolutely. Social networking sites like MySpace offer huge potential audience for advertisers, 41.3 million people who spend an awful lot of time there is something that advertisers are just absolutely salivating over. But you have to remember, you know its user generated content. And there’s all sorts of risks associated with that. Does your ad end up appearing next to something that maybe is not a good fit with your brand or you know is inappropriate content.

Ted Murphy:

Are you trying to say that there’s inappropriate content on “My Space?”

Debra Williamson:

Oh, gosh. Am I the first one to say that? Oh my, gosh. Yeah well you know MySpace has been trying really hard to keep up with it but with something like 70 million users how can they possibly. The other side of that too is that if a student is working on his own profile page or posting notes to another friend’s page, he’s probably going to be more focused on that activity than he is maybe on actually looking at the ads. So that’s why so many marketers actually create profile pages and try to work themselves into the community rather than just placing banners or something rather simplistic on there. I think that another angle you can look at is that because the content is user generated people tend to reveal a lot of personal information about themselves For example on Facebook if you go on to the site you can find all the people at a specific university who like “The Simpsons.” Could be hundreds, thousands of people and that’s kind of fun for students and exciting for marketers certainly, you know they’re always looking to better target their ads. But you kind of wonder is it too personal? I wonder you know should marketers be able to tap into information that people post about their personal lives? And there’s a lot of people who would say “no” even the people who actually posted this information about themselves online.

The last thing I would say with regard to whether this is a good marketing vehicle is obviously there’s something really seductive about this whole free-wheeling atmosphere of MySpace and social networking sites. They’re cool. They’re hot. And you just sort of sense it’s like palpable, you know marketers wanting to be involved in this environment. But you know there’s a huge downside. What marketer wants his brand associated with a site that was the subject of a “Dateline” NBC investigation as MySpace was? Is it a site, that on that show the Connecticut Attorney General called “a sexual predator’s dream and a parent’s worst nightmare.” You square that with all the excitement and interest against that and you, whoa. So for now I think the feeling of marketers is really guarded interest. MySpace and these other companies like them definitely need to demonstrate that the atmosphere is really safe for advertisers. And safe for the users before I think the biggest brands will really agree to jump in and sign on with the actual big bucks that they’re looking for.

Ted Murphy:

We actually had a caller who left a voice mail for us that wasn’t necessarily targeted specifically at marketing but is definitely a concern along those lines. Let me play that for you right here and we’ll see what kind of response you have to this.

Debra Williamson:

Sure.

Phone Call:

Hi, I had a question for Internet Marketing Voodoo. I was watching a newscast where some cops were posing as teenagers with a MySpace profile to capture predators. And they wound up catching one. But I couldn’t help but wonder if only one of many, are out there targeting our children and other MySpace users? Is this issue of privacy larger than we can imagine? Are they doing anything to prevent this from happening? I hope I can see some answers. Thank you.

Debra Williamson:

See that’s the way most that watched the same “Dateline” NBC show that I did because that was the same exact setup of it. MySpace has started running public service ads to educate teens about online safety and certainly about time. And you know it also regularly deletes profiles it considers suspect and it employs people who do nothing but review profiles for inappropriate content. That said the caller is absolutely right. The one person who was caught is probably just the tip of the iceberg with what might be going on in these sites. So it’s really, it’s up to the parents to educate their children and school administrators certainly need to be taking a very strong look at these sites and make sure that the kids aren’t using the social network in inappropriate ways and aren’t revealing too much information about themselves to anybody who might be able to find it. I certainly think that all the press coverage has gotten the attention of parents and school administrators. And I do believe that the issue of sexual predators is way broader than just what might be occurring here on MySpace or other social networking sites. But I guess because the sites are in the public eye they really ought to be the leaders in protecting out kids.

Ted Murphy:

Really, before it was MySpace it was AOL and you know it’s just kind of changed over time as to what forums they’re going to try these activities. So --

Debra Williamson:

Absolutely. And it’s definitely an ongoing problem. And it just so happens that MySpace is kind of the hot button right now for that particular issue.

Ted Murphy:

So. Given those dangers would you still say it’s a good idea, for marketers to look at social networks, as an avenue for connecting to today’s youth?

Debra Williamson:

Absolutely. I mean I think that marketers want to go where the youth are and certainly social networking is where they’re at. I mean there’s been lots of studies that talk about a big decline in use of TV and other media and the rise of time spent on the Internet. Although I have to say that these kids are just as good at multi-tasking and going online and sending instant messages and watching television and listening to their iPod at the same time. But I really do think that for marketers it is uncharted territory. There’s no manual. There’s no case study certainly to marketing on social networks. You could form a great connection with users and spread your word broadly and have a great result or you could be called on the carpet for being too obvious with your message. I think that there’s also a risk that this is a fad and that young people could go elsewhere if the marketing gets too loud and the rules get too strict.

Ted Murphy:

So what are the top three things that you think marketers should know about using social networks as marketing vehicles?

Debra Williamson:

The list is always going to change. But right now you know as of today, it’s going to change because it’s very much an evolving territory. But right now I would say you know a huge audience doesn’t necessarily make a site a great advertising vehicle. You’ve got to catch the people’s attention as well. You can’t just assume that all 41 million people who are visiting MySpace are going to notice your ad. And like I said before social networks are uncharted territory as a marketing vehicle. And everyone’s feeling their way. You know, even the sites, even a MySpace or Facebook, they’re figuring out the best way to incorporate advertising and marketing into their sites. So they’re great for those who want to be really creative and take risks. But for those who are more cautious or more protective of their brand image it would probably be wise to hang back and see how the business shakes out over the coming months.

And the last thing I would say is that you know social networking is sustained by its users. It’s sustained by the number of people who use whatever social networking site and how often they come back. And if the attraction stays or a student moves on to a different site, a network can fade. I like to think of it, as a network can fade as quickly as a party and when the last keg has run out.

Ted Murphy:

That’s great. Well, Debra I appreciate your time today. If people want more information about social networks and college students online you can check out Debra’s full report at eMarkerter.com. Debra, I appreciate the time. If anybody else has some more questions for Internet Marketing Voodoo you can give us a call at 1-866-206-4461. We hope to have you back on the show again in the future, Debra. And that’s a great report that you’ve got on eMarketer.

Debra Williamson:

Great Ted. Thanks so much for having me.

Ted Murphy:

Thank you.

[End of Audio]

View Debra's Report: College Students Online: Social Networks and the Net Generation

Marketing Resources
Download Top Ten Things to Know When Marketing With Social Networks (PDF - 679.8KB)

Listen to the Social Networks podcast.

Contact MindComet about developing a social network tailored to your consumers or seeding efforts on established networks.

Subscribe to the Internet Marketing Voodoo podcast in iTunes.

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social networks, online communities, MySpace, Facebook