Social Media Advertising - 6 Key Factors Revisited
08 Dec
Posted by: Bryan Bennett in: Advertising, Facebook, Social Media
AdWeek has an article today that talks about branded Facebook applications and how big brands from Nike to Coca Cola to Ford have had very little success with their respective apps. We need to be very careful not to throw the baby out with the bath water here. In his critique of the AdWeek story, Chas Edwards from Federated Media points to several successful brand campaigns with the Graffiti Facebook applications which have included the likes of BMW, Intel, and Acuvue, while here at Watercooler we’ve had success with brands such as Nike, Samsung, Target, and Disney with many more good things to come. So why are the brands mentioned by AdWeek having trouble with their apps? The answers were mentioned by a few industry folks quoted in the article, but can also be found in a post I wrote a few months ago. In that piece, I discussed the 6 key factors that advertisers need to address in order to be successful in social media. They are:
- Be relevant
- Be authentic
- Be part of the product
- Use the social graph
- Don’t get in the way
- Analyze the right metrics
The apps mentioned by AdWeek violated several if not all of these factors. They made the apps all about the brand and only about the brand. That will never work. Instead, brands must engage with consumers in a way that the consumer finds meaningful in relevant. In other words, brands need to go where the consumers are and inject themselves into those conversations rather than creating completely new conversations and expecting consumers to come to them. That can work with some brands, but only those that transcend the traditional advertising model and look more like content. Think movies, TV, music, etc.
[...] as well as traditional media. I’ve touched on the subject a few times in recent posts here and here. Most recently, Keith Rabois, VP of Strategy and Business Development at Slide, wrote a [...]