Marketing Within Social Networks

Three approaches to commercializing social networks

Social network users, particularly those who contribute significant content, are like overbearing chefs who rule the kitchens where they work. Intruders are unwelcome and input to the planning or preparation of dishes is received with incredulous disdain. How then can marketers and site owners seek commercial outcomes in an online social network? Current and upcoming strategies include:

1. Infiltrate the content (let marketers into the kitchen)

Coke Zero is a signal example of the folly in making a clumsy or unsophisticated entry into social networks, but that mistake does not point to the end of commercial content. Network sites are working hard on deals to integrate big-name commercial content and that content is very popular on some networks. This suggests an important shift away from true online networking; a site where users mainly view slickly produced and strategic commercial content is no longer a social community because the content does not reflect the users themselves, but reflects only their preferences in the content they view. Amazon would almost be considered a social community in this context if we allowed so broad a use of the concept, but without communities’ fundamental contribution to and involvement with content, an online community does not really exist. Further, this shift risks lowering users’ ownership, and hence their involvement, in the communities.

YouTube appears to be travelling this road, with recent most-viewed videos often being professionally produced, commercial clips. These include overt ads with appealing, high-quality creative, plus mainstream media content like music videos. On the latter example, recent controversy over IP rights is rapidly being quelled by deals struck with rights owners and YouTube is poised to become a platform for delivering traditional content from traditional providers including the music industry giants. It is difficult to imagine content infiltration alone being a model that will sustain growth or profit, and its over-use will shift sites away from the important, grass-roots values and potentials of online social networking.

2. Commercialise the site (surround the kitchen with ads and clicks and searches).

Current additions to MySpace reflect this approach. Banner ads appear on all pages and searches within MySpace are already quite heavy with paid elements surrounding and embedded within the search content. One danger here is that community members may begin to perceive that MySpace is, in essence, selling the content that users have provided for free, and that they provided toward what they perceived as a user-oriented, true social network. News Corp. last week invited applications in Australia for a new Account Manager position, charged with developing and exploiting new commercial opportunities on MySpace. We shouldn’t have to wait more than a year or two to see how creative and forward-looking they are, and whether their site commercialization harms their numbers.

A new alternative

3. Share the profits (give the cooks a percentage for each plate served)

Perhaps future challenges to MySpace and YouTube domination will hinge upon an equitable exchange: users share content, and corporations share profits. Revver, a video-sharing network competing in the YouTube realm, appends paid commercial video clips onto the end of each user-posted clip – then shares a portion of the ad revenue with the user who provided the original content. Could this signal a future proliferation of ‘PaidSpaces’ where the most savvy and relevant – and most visited – members of online networks profit from their presence? Members of social communities might find this more palatable than ‘dollars out’ commercialization of networks, and if this trend gains any momentum MySpace could be hard-pressed to retain its best contributors without adopting a similar scheme.

This is my no means an exhaustive list of approaches to profiting from social networks. Other methods include the creation of pages for companies or products (without any dishonest grass-roots artifice) and promoting the products among relevant sub-communities, sometimes with sales incentives, to generate genuine social networked spread of a message. Also individual users are exploring their own click-through profit schemes and user-inserted ad content, and online business are proliferating to promote such strategies among profit-seeking community members. What will come along next is hard to predict, but a certain truth is that marketers running these sites, and marketers hoping to wring money from them, had better learn the nuances of online social communities and look to some creative strategies to find a long-term advantage; changes in this realm are happening faster than most marketers are ‘discovering’ last year’s changes.

A final note, perhaps the most important and making the above somewhat irrelevant: Because it is so hard for marketers to stay abreast of the rapid changes in the membership, location and attitudes of online social communities that are important to them, a default approach should be this: Leave it alone but listen and learn. If communities are taken more as a marketing research tool than an audience to target, much can be learned about engaged, involved audiences and brand perceptions. Being reactive to the communities is much safer strategy for creating online goodwill and positive buzz, whereas trying to infiltrate, manipulate or broadcast to a social network is fraught with perils.