“New Media” is an umbrella term used to refer to the wave of new platforms and content models which have flooded the market with the birth of the Internet (that’s a simplified definition, of course, but for our purposes here, it will suffice). One of the primary modes of communication in New Media (and an excellent example of new media in and of itself) is the social network. It’s also one of the most profitable avenues through which one can reach their consumers, if one knows how to leverage it.
The problem is, many organizations don’t. They simply approach social networks as they would any other medium – a potentially devastating mistake on their part. After all, the first thing any advertiser should know before setting out to begin a campaign on a social network is that social networks, as new media, are almost nothing like the advertising platforms of yesteryear; yet many people still approach them as if they are.
Today, we’re going to set out to examine just how it is that social networks differ from the advertising platforms of old. The first of these is…
1. User Participation
This is the first, most obvious difference. Unlike more traditional content mediums, users can actively participate in social networks – indeed, this is one of the primary draws of social media for many advertisers. Instead of just throwing pictures or sounds at them through a screen or speaker, they can actually connect with their users, who can comment, share, and question, and generally just make their voices heard. Unfortunately, this means that advertisers must also take…
2. A More Active Role
A social campaign isn’t like a standard marketing campaign, where you can simply throw together an ad, and start working on timeslots and networks on which it’ll air. With a social campaign (unless we’re talking viral marketing, which is much harder to pull off right but a touch more low-maintenance), you’re going to have to take an active role in your social media presence. Simply placing ads into the sidebars of a social site is both tacky and irritating – the majority of your users will ignore such ads (and many of them use ad-blockers because of the current sub-par quality of Internet advertisements).
Ultimately, you’re going to need to focus on…
3. Consumer Discourse
As I’ve said, social networks allow for users to participate in advertising campaigns (which can be disastrous, depending on what sort of campaign you’re running). This means that consumers can talk to you. The best businesses will talk back, and establish a discourse with them. The worst will simply continue crowing about their products. Unfortunately – and I can’t emphasize that enough – the days where such conduct was acceptable have long since passed. If you start speaking like the users are tuning into a TV commercial, they’ll start tuning out from your campaign.
After all…
4. Consumers Hate Interruptions
One of the most aggravating things about Internet marketing is that it interrupts the flow of what a user is doing. Believe it or not, even if you’re selling a product someone’s interested in, people hate that; especially on websites such as YouTube. Same deal if you’re trying to sell a product on Twitter. If a user’s twitter feed is broken up by excessively salesy tweets, with little relevant information (and no indication that there’s a human, rather than a bot, on the other end of the line), chances are, you’re going to lose some followers.
All this boils down to the fact that social media, like all new media works on…
5. Different Content Delivery
The way content is delivered, the means by which information proliferates, is fundamentally different from more traditional mediums. I’ll try to utilize a suitable analogy here, so bear with me: Information on television can be likened to water flowing down a pipe. The ways the user can interact with it is limited, and the information always flows straight outward from a central source. Information on the Internet, on the other hand, can be likened to buckets of food coloring next to a public pool. Anyone can contribute, and that information flows outward like a cloud, rather than moving from destination to destination like it’s within a pipe or series of tubes.
As a result of the vastly different (often overwhelming) means by which content is delivered online, it often feels different. Because of this…
6. Information Tends to be “Piecemeal”
Ask anyone who’s ever been on Facebook or any other social networking site for more than a few years (I’ve got a Facebook tab open as I write this), and they’ll affirm what we all know already – Social media is rewiring our brains, and our attention spans are getting shorter. It’s bad enough that some people have posited that it might be ruining our minds. As a result, any content an advertiser might share on social media not only has to be witty and genuine, it generally also has to be short and easily digestible. This, coupled with the way in which data is distributed means that most of the data on social networks is…
7. Unstructured Data
While there are certainly metrics which exist to measure the success of a social campaign, as a whole, the act of figuring out whether or not a campaign has been a success (and gathering data collected as a result of that campaign) is something of a herculean task, mostly because we’ve never really had to deal with that sort of torrential onslaught of information before. Steps have been taken to address this concern, but unstructured data’s still something a lot of advertisers and analysts may have to deal with at some point.
Keep some aspirin handy.
Of course, the act of gathering demographic information raises a few concerns about…
8. User Privacy
Back in the days of yore, advertisers didn’t know a great deal about the people who were watching or listening at home. They didn’t really know who was driving by their billboards, reading the newspaper, looking at the side of a bus. They could make an educated guess, of course, but they had no way of knowing for certain. Social networking has changed that dynamic. To a certain degree, you know the name and details of every customer that interacts with you – and for a fee, Facebook will often provide some of that information to advertising agencies. As a result, social media opens up a whole new can of privacy concerns which were never an issue on more traditional platforms.
Privacy aside, there’s still the fact that…
9. Things can Go Wrong More Easily
Another considerable difference between social media and old media is the fact that, where advertising is concerned, a lot more can go wrong on social networks. Users can hijack a poorly thought out campaign and completely destroy it. A lack of understanding of the platform could thus cause irreparable damage to your brand. Of course, since social networks don’t exist in a vacuum, a lot of old media has been pulled into the social scene, with varying (and occasionally disastrous) results. When you enter into a forum where the users reign supreme, well…
Things tend to get a touch more chaotic. Speaking of chaos…
10. More Fragmentation
The fact is, an ad designed for television could, content aside, be shown on virtually every network without any problem. A magazine advertisement could easily be printed in a wide range of different publications. By contrast, a campaign designed to be run on Twitter isn’t going to work out so well on Facebook or Google +. The fact that there are so many different social networks, with so many different UIs and standards, means that, as we’ve covered before, choosing a social network can be a feat unto itself.
Those are just a few ways in which social networks are distinct from older media. Can you folks think of any others I’ve missed?
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