“Word of Mouth” Meets “Word of Mouse”
If you are at all involved with marketing, particularly in the interactive venue, you have heard both terms. Yesterday, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, took these ideas one step further in formally unveiling marketing campaigns that combine the two, further propelling the growing popularity of social networking. He calls this new trend “pull marketing” in which consumers voluntarily endorse the brands and products they like. As reported in AdAge (November 6, 2007), he “unveiled a system in which marketers can marry an ad message to a user-initiated endorsement of a product or service.”
The idea behind this new venture expands on the notion of peer-to-peer brand recommendations combined with paid advertising from actual companies. Ads will be served up via news feeds based on criteria on members’ profiles (movie interests, age, activities, etc) or if that member has had a friend endorse that brand. From the marketer’s perspective, this allows for more control of what audiences receive their messages which allows for more efficient advertising.
Additionally, corporations are to take it one step further by creating their own brand pages in which users can write on their “walls” and endorse products. This method has been successful for many non-profits to recruit members as well as fundraise.
Facebook Beacon – a new feature – will allow marketers to link members’ activity on their site with activities on Facebook. For example, if you add “Saw III” to your Blockbuster® queue, the next time you log into Facebook, you will receive a notification if you would like to share that movie choice with friends. If you say yes, the recommendation gets sent to you friends and in the future, one might receive an AdServe when a new horror film is released.
I believe this new – or more refined – approach to online marketing could be an extremely effective way to advance and utilize the popularity of social networking sites while at the same time allowing marketers to have some control of the messaging and endorsement of their products (via company paid ad buys). And in this day and age where most consumers have been desensitized to a lot of traditional marketing methods, this could be the new approach to grabbing consumers’ attention. Additionally, since Facebook does gather a great deal of data from its users marketers have can be as broad or narrow in marketing its products. I think this will eliminate a lot of the annoying non-relevant ads that users tend to ignore. Just like the thought behind social networking sites is to provide content that is relevant to each user, online marketing should follow this successful trend. Facebook Beacon intends to do just that.
To learn more about this, visit http://www.facebook.com/press/releases.php?p=9166
Category: General Thoughts
November 7th, 2007 at 4:42 pm
This will be interesting to see if it actually works or not. Zuckerberg is known for doing things not readily accepted by Facebook community. I can see where criticism can come into play here - big corporations manipulating the social networking site - but it’s actually kind of cool because your friends are the one suggesting the products to you. What would be really cool, is if users weren’t so limited to the few corporations that paid big bucks (i.e. Blockbuster, Verizon, and Coca-Cola … to name a few) to get in the door. What if I rent from Netflix, talk on Cingular, and picket against bottle water manufacturers? Is this what I’m promoting by being a Facebook user?
November 14th, 2007 at 3:40 pm
Interesting concept. But who gets paid if I recommend using Adobe Photoshop to all my friends in my social network? Just Facebook? Adobe should pay me for the recommendation as well as Facebook for hosting this advertising service. This would make recommending brands and products worth my time. While I might voluntarily recommend some music and movies on Facebook, I don’t see myself voluntarily promoting brands or other products without a payoff.
November 14th, 2007 at 4:11 pm
When you recommend movies and music to others via Facebook, you are indirectly promoting brands. Based on your reccomendations, people may add that movie to their NetFlix or Blockbuster queue, go out and see that movie or download that particular album.
I dont think that recommending brands/products to your circle of friends is something that is really done because it is “worth ones time”. It’s something that goes along with the evolution of the online community. For example, I have seen numerous bulletins from friends asking for a good hotel recommendation when they are traveling or even advice on getting a new laptops. And many of these I have answered based on my experience.
Product and brand recommendation happens organically in the real world and is naturally being emulated in the online world. I’m pretty sure none of the people in the office who cannot stop going on and on about their new iphone aren’t getting paid by Apple. I am also pretty sure that they have in some form or another recommended their iphone online.
March 12th, 2008 at 5:16 am
Hello,
Very nice article.Keep it up.
March 13th, 2008 at 10:11 am
Has anyone out there heard about WideCircles.com. It seems like a way better service then wasting money on PPC. Apparently they are using refering websites ( forums, blogs, wiki, etc. ) and have a viral word of mouth distributed approach to it. My friend told me he got around 100 visits from single post which cost him $0.40c. I am going to give them a try today . In case you are intrested here is it. http://widecircles.com?s=imt1
March 17th, 2008 at 9:22 am
Has anyone out there heard about WideCircles.com. It seems like a way better service then regular pay per click. Apparently they are using refering websites ( forums, blogs, wiki, etc. ) and have a viral word of mouth distributed approach to it which is engaging rather ther then interrupting customers. My friend told me he got over 500 visits from single post which cost him around $0.40c, within a few days. I am going to give them a try today . In case you are intrested here is it. http://widecircles.com?imt=3
March 18th, 2008 at 12:02 am
The new distributed viral forum/blog/wiki/classified/etc viral advertising engine is here. Spread the word about your product or service in short amount of time to millions of people. Get residual traffic and increase search engine visibility by using long lasting backlinks. Low cost, no pay per click fraud issues and great ROI. http://widecircles.com?imt=3
April 5th, 2008 at 8:07 am
Most of people started using the internet so online marketing , internet is the mouth of the world
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c.mahe
Did anyone out there give a try to Wide Circles or WideCircles. They are new word of mouth advertising platform, apparently they can push massive amount of messages through social network mediums like forums,blogs,wiki’s and so on. They say that they only bill for posts active for minimum of 5 days and price seems pretty affordable. I am going to give Wide Circles aka WideCircles a try since I am tired of PPC fraud.
http://widecircles.com