Saul Hansell has a fascinating article in today's New York Times about how big advertisers like Unilever, Procter & Gamble, and Volkswagen are trying to leverage the power of social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube to market their products. There are some great case studies of how some large companies have pulled off successful word-of-mouth campaigns via social networking sites.
Now that the big media players like Fox, which bought MySpace, and Google, which bought YouTube, are taking a dominant position in the social networking space, it will become increasingly difficult for companies to gain marketing traction using these tools. As the corporate owners of the social networking sites seek to earn a return on their large investments, one should expect a more robust array of features offered to advertisers.
Paradoxically, more bells and whistles doesn't mean better results for advertisers. Rather, consumers, who are exposed to 10,000 commercial messages a week on average, are cynical of advertised messages and tend to tune them out. In contrast, spontaneous and less polished messages tend to be much more successfu. Hansell wrote:
"Sometimes marketers find that in the end, the unplanned is what works best. Crispin Porter placed a new crop of Volkswagen commercials on YouTube and a handful of people watched them. Then a user uploaded a grainy version of one of the same commercials. It has been viewed more than 1.7 million times.
'You can’t explain this,' said Mr. Benjamin of Crispin Porter. 'Someone passed it on to a friend, who passed it to others, until eventually it gets in the right people’s hands. You just can’t predict what will happen.'"
