"Reach over 350 million active users on Facebook. Learn how to connect your business with real customers through Facebook Ads" - so goes the Facebook online pitch.
From a marketing viewpoint, when you look at the large public social sites such as Facebook, Youtube, Twitter - are you just looking at traditional mass media advertising applied to a new channel?
Despite all the potential of targeted and measurable marketing through social media, perhaps even genuine conversations between brands and consumers; the big budgets have gravitated to the same mass media mentality. A case of "when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail?"
Perhaps it just means that we have lowered the bar on so-called "above the line" broadcast advertising. What's the difference between a 30 second ad on the Superbowl broadcast and an online ad placed before 350 million Facebook users? Even with attempts at online targeting. Or any amount of advice about so-called influentials and "going viral"...?
On the consumer side of the equation there is another factor that tends to lower this bar...they (we!) only have so much attention.
Brands can attempt to carve out a presence on large social sites but the competition for attention is intense and the brand message often out of context.
Individuals who are lucky enough to succeed, are invariably converted from conversationalists into broadcasters - you simply cannot maintain personal relationships with 50,000 followers on Twitter or friends on Facebook.
For brands, the dilema is more complicated. If you are lucky enough to create the buzz, generate the interest.... you may have the resources to service this interest but who are these prospective customers? And how do you generate an ongoing conversation without the distraction of Facebook, Twitter or any other social cocktail party that happens to be site du jour.
We have talked previously about our preferred 'hub-and-spoke' approach to this challenge for the brand but the continued growth in these large social sites does underscore their mass media (one-to-many broadcast) qualities as places to recruit but not to dwell!
As Grant Johnston (www.chiefmarketer.com) observes - the new media landscape "implies that mass marketing is not limited to traditional channels and more measurement MUST accompany all media spends, regardless of media used." He also reminds us of direct marketing disciplines such as testing.
However, in the brave new world of social media, I believe that we need to go further than this - we should also be asking "where do we want the ongoing conversation to take place?" and "how are we going to identify these individuals?"
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