Get in with your core 1%. Do the ground work and use the technology at hand to make people connections

Some of the most vibrant spaces online are social networks. They are the hubs of person-to-person communications that remain open to the wider group to view and get involved. Tools to do so are easy and accessible, and participants are free to join conversations at any point, as tracking back through previous dialogue is simple and easy. Essentially these tools enable people to publish their voice out to the world on a scale that could only previously be reached by broadcasters.

The credibility that underlies word-of-mouth and it’s endorsement is nothing new. We’ve all been communicating person to person since the dawn of time. If anything we are returning to our roots, preferring relationships with people, that are meaningful and rewarding to the cold mass automation of the factory mindset.

We can look at numbers endlessly and try to determine where the eye-balls are and what spaces they have left and perhaps, where they might go. But here you are still just estimating and acting in a broadcast manner. That may have been the way offline, but its not utilizing what is most precious and unique online. The web is personalized and on demand. It is person to person services and conversations, and it should reduce barriers and bring people together. If a brand can meet people at this level and utilize technology that is effective and efficient, and a manner that is genuine and authentic – then it is surely potent to explode onto the scene garnering trust and loyalty. In such a way social networks are useful to brands, but there is something more.

The real holy grail of social networks lies in the power of the enthusiasts themselves. They are the ones, usually only making up 1% of the crowd who are the initiators and the influencers. They are the ones who propagate messages on their own time, with their own energy, and spread it out, innovate on it and creates fresh ideas. They can do it because their relationships are credible and authentic and their motives for involvement are situated in an innate core enthusiasm that they share with the brand or product.

I don’t think social recommendation is a ‘new’ social currency, but rather something we’ve always had. What is new today is the unprecedented access to free online tools that make communication, networking and sharing easy enough that anyone can do it who wants to do it. Consumers today usually know more about a brand’s product than most people working within the brand. If they don’t know it, they soon will. And when they do, they’ll share it.

Get in with your core 1%. Do the ground work and use the technology at hand to make people connections, encourage conversation and be honest. Theory behind word-of-mouth marketing, engaging enthusiasms and utilizing the platform of social networks is all meaningless if the brand itself continues to build billboards online and hope that ‘if you build it, they will come’.

~ Gautama Payment

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Originally written for Brand Republic. I am copying the original post by Havlev Pinkerfield below.

Vox pop: Is social recommendation the new advertising currency?
by Hayley Pinkerfield, Revolution UK 01-May-07

Are social networks the best place to push your brand message?

New social networking research commissioned by Microsoft has revealed that 35 per cent of people recommend a brand socially and 25 per cent post a comment about a brand. With over 215 million user accounts globally, there are more personal spaces worldwide than there are people in the UK, France and Germany. This would explain findings from Jupiter that 50 per cent of marketers plan to use social networks to reach consumers this year. Following IAB figures revealing huge increase in online ad spend and AOP stats which showed a decline in interruptive formats, we asked the industry: are social networks the future for online ads?
- MICHAEL STECKLER: EMEA regional advertising sales, Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions

Social recommendation is the next iteration of customer segmentation – that’s where it’s going to make the most impact on marketers. It goes beyond identifying groups of people to pass your message on, to individuals who’ll do it.

Some advertisers and sites are doing a good job of engaging consumers. Among those consumers, there is a keenness to engage with more branded content. This is probably because it’s of a higher standard and more relevant. People are interacting with other users, for instance via blogging.

There are huge opportunities for marketers to both advertise and create content in that space. You need to understand why consumers are there and stay sensitive to brand values. Identify brand advocates, they can potentially be very influential. Give them great content and it can become viral.

Although these are positive results, marketers need to be very specific about how they engage through content.
- CHRIS SETH: UK MD, Piczo

It’s another currency in today’s media world – customers, consumers, are dictating that. The terms of media reach and media frequency are something that every brand needs to understand. If your message is not relevant in terms of message and context and specific to social networks, that’s a missed opportunity.

Brands that do it well offer more content with which consumers play and co-create new messaging. Comic Relief invited members to put forward ideas on how to make Red Nose Day the best ever. This put power into the hands of the member base. The right brand presence is relevant, authentic and offers meaningful content to encourage social networkers to co-create a message.
- MARTIN GILL: head of new media, Comic Relief

Social recommendation has always been one of the most powerful tools – if not the most powerful tool – for promoting a product or brand. It builds on the unparallelled trust and confidence embodied within a peer-to-peer interaction. The challenge for an organisation like Comic Relief has been how to stimulate that word of mouth: what do people want to talk about and where are they talking? Now, with people using social network spaces more fully, it is possible to know where people are, so we have worked to be in those spaces too, and to empower our advocates to ’spread the red’ and get involved with us.
- MARK PORTER: client relationship director, Tonic

The economics of reach for the social network marketer are simply awesome, especially when you consider the high production costs of traditional advertising formats. We see it as a matter of content being an agent of the brand, capable of broad consumer engagement, while being adoptable and adaptable. It’s as though the content seeding is only the beginning of an unknown journey, the length of which will be something the consumer decides. All across the online social networking space, page views are rising phenomenally, but the overall user adoption is beginning to plateau. Targeting will prove increasingly difficult. Youth is now older, but silver surfers are adopting younger habits and reinventing themselves. We need to try to find a way to get big ads into small spaces.