Abbey Klaasen's Ad Age story on the concern over whether Facebook and MySpace are really next generation CRM tools brings up some interesting points. No one has cracked the code when it comes to capitalizing on social networks from an ad perspective - though people are certainly knocking themselves out trying. The article points to an emarketer stat that says social networks are expected to rake in $900 million in advertising this year.
The fact is, traditional portals are losing audiences to social networks, big time. Joe Marchese from Mediapost's Online Spin sums it up best - portals were the first, last and only online media that behaved like traditional media as a large reach single buy.
Yes, the current social networking format may lend itself more to one-to-one relationship building with customers versus an easy ad buy approach. This is especially true given that the formation of passionate groups doesn't always coincide with a marketing agenda. The beauty and the pain of social networking is that it's entirely user controlled; however, the walled garden infrastructure inherent in today's social nets make it difficult for niche groups to form and proliferate in a marketer-friendly way. Social nets as a marketing channel are still brand new and as they evolve so will segmentation, making paid media a more viable option. The game changer, Joe Marchese puts it, will be the ability to deliver brand marketers value across the extremely fragmented social media ecosystem. To make this happen on any scale, some of those walls will need to come down.
That said, is it possible that CRM conducted within a public forum is, in its own way, a new form of marketing? If a public comment on a social networker’s profile page results in traffic - or new links - to the brand's site or microsite, is that a marketing event? If the ad inventory of the future is inherently social, it may be time to re-think our both our industry's vernacular and measurement approach.
