Adam Sarner, an analyst with market research firm Gartner, has released a report that predicts that half of all social marketing initiatives will flop.
He presented his findings Thursday at a Gartner IT Symposium in which he projects that 75 percent of Fortune 1000 companies with web sites will have undertaken some kind of online social-networking initiative for marketing or customer relations purposes.
Many in the industry think Sarner’s conclusion is off base and overly pessimistic. I actually agree with Sarner. Most will fail for one of three reasons: (a) the strategy driving the idea sucks; (b) the execution sucks; or (c) the program provides no value to the end user.
Social advertising initiatives need to strike a balance between providing value to the marketer and giving the consumer something in return. There may be many other ways in social media environments to strike such a balance, but at Buddy Media we have found that companies can strike this balance if they develop branded social media applications that engage consumers with their brand, evoke consumer emotion, and measure the effectiveness of the consumer engagement. If such branded social media applications, or as we call them, app-vertisments, are able to do this three things while also integrating the brand’s features and benefits into the engagement experience, then they can not only provide consumers with value, but also build social brand loyalty, and transform consumers into devotees of, and advocates for, a company’s brand.
Recent data on branded social media applications, or app-vertisments, that we have developed for our clients supports this idea. The data shows that our clients’ app-vertisments yield incredible loyalty, with 85% of the users returning to the application multiple times, and that consumers who engaged with app-vertisment did so, on average, for 2 minutes and 35 seconds. This engagement time period is 75 times greater than the time consumers spend interacting with traditional banner ads and five times greater than the time they spend watching a typical TV commercial. Recently I presented these findings at Web 2.0 and discussed how brands can be the biggest beneficiaries of social media.
As Sarner states, social media marketing and advertising, including app-vertisments, offer brands a “lifeline” they can use to stay in touch with consumers during a difficult financial climate. His point reinforces our belief that now is the time for brands to increase their focus on developing social media campaigns, and to build social brand loyalty – loyalty that yields consumers who become brand evangelists willing to spread a brand’s messages through their social network. And not only will building this social brand loyalty help companies sustain their brands while the financial climate remains cloudy, it will also provide them with significant long-term benefits when this climate eventually clears up.
