The Cost of Friending and What it Means for Marketing in Social Networks
Alexander van Elsas’s latest post looks at the role of marketing in Social Networks. It’s a long post, but I think you won’t regret reading it.
Among other things, Van Elsas basically argues that marketing in social networks is not a worthwhile enterprise.
Here is why: According to van Elsas, there is zero cost to our virtual interactions and ‘friending’ (though that can be argued about, I think) we can also create a multitude of virtual identities, which, in the end, leads to us becoming anonymous again and because there is no cost involved, a lot of the relationships in this context are easily severed and often not relevant for making any assumption about anybody who is part of this network:
I can emerge myself into a social graph with literally thousands of friends, only to hide my real self behind this mass of people. I can be anonymous, an alter ego, a persiflage of myself because it really doesn’t matter either way. There is hardly any investment into such on-line relationships, nor is it expected.
That is an interesting argument and quite coincidentally fits in well with something Steven Hodson of Winextra says in a post today (yet in a different context):
[...] when was the last time you went through those hundreds; or in some cases thousands, of supposed friends and even remembered who the hell they are and why you have them in your list to begin with. At some point all those names in those lists mean absolutely nothing. They have no value because chances are you can’t even remember what value friending them was even bringing to the table. [...] The true economy of friending is what you get out of these networks – not what they get out of you.
That is very true on quite a number of levels, I think.
For a marketer in a social network, according to van Elsas, it is also part of a rather large problem that is very hard to overcome for marketers (my emphases):
First of all, you won’t find the real me there. I’m hiding behind thousands of friends, only showing you the public me, a persiflage of real life. You might think that this universal social network will provide you better information than demography does now. Yes, I am 39 years old, married to a lovely wife, I have four kids and I live in the Netherlands. But that really is just a small, public part of me.
[...]
Second, social networks are primarily there for us to interact with other people. That is the real power of a social network. It isn’t about a social graph, which is a static representation of the connections between people. It is my day to day interactions within that social graph that makes it valuable. And, as I have stated before, advertisement has no value within these interactions. Marketeers are merely trespassers in our on-line conversations.
Does that mean there isn’t any hope for marketeers in this future of social networking? Sure there is. But not within the social network itself or within the interactions that take place in that network. Mark Zuckerberg is right to think that having access to my profile, my interactions, and my social graph is valuable. But the value of having that data lies outside of Facebook or any other social network for that matter. The real value comes only within the context of a user searching or buying something on-line. That is where the data becomes valuable.
And users obviously tune out marketing messages in social networks anyway, as can be seen from the miniscule click-through rates for Facebook ads. But the information can be used – but not in the social network itself. It’s use is in complimenting the ad targeting in Google or the recommendation engine of Amazon.And that is why van Elsas concludes that “the future of Social Advertisment lies outside of social networks.”
I sure hope so.
Cartoon courtesy of Gapingvoid.com
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