Facebook much??
Lindsay and I went to see The Social Network when it was in theatres the first time (none of this re-run for the awards season crap for us!!!), and we both thought it should be the movie of the year. I mean, how many other movies out there touch as large of a segment of the population as this one?? As artistic as it may have been, I’m sure there weren’t as many people lining up to watch something like Brokeback Mountain or Burlesque as there were for The Facebook Movie. Primarily because those other two sucked.
So in terms of a marketing ploy, it’s really quite brilliant. Looking at the fact that they have over 500 million users worldwide, and joining and creating pages for whatever you want and everything you could potentially think of, all for free, it makes perfect sense why the world is moving in the direction of social networking versus classical advertising. If we look at the usage of social networking sites over the past decade, the increase has been an accountants wet dream come to life.
Some stats are showing that people spend an average of 6 or more hours on social networking sites per month, however I would think that would be a lot higher, as many people are feeling like they are becoming addicted to checking their Home button.
If you check out the advertisements from time to time on the sidebar of the pages, you can see a whole bunch of stuff advertised. The major way this differs from classic marketing is that in the old days you would pay a tv company or a radio company or a billboard company to display your information for all to see, whether anything came from it or not. I remember a project I was working on in the past needed some models and we had a casting call advertised in the newspaper…..with the incorrect address, date and time listed. When we contacted the newspaper company, they pretty much said to deal with it, and that they wouldn’t refund any money because the ad had already run. In other words, screw you, we’re taking your money and there ain’t a damn thing you can do about it!! Needless to say, no one showed up that day, and I was not a happy cat.
The way a lot of the social networking sites advertisements work is in a “pay-per-click” manner, which means the ad only generates payments when someone takes the time to click the link and check out their website. This gives a much better flow through of quality traffic than the typical “put it up and see what happens and oh yeah pay me bitches” method of advertising, which means lower cost, better tracking of stats to see what marketing plan is working better, and what your conversion percentage is from people clicking the link to buying your product or service.
Tim Ferriss talked about using Google Adsense to pick the title and front graphic for his book The Four Hour Workweek by setting up dummy-pages that went nowhere with different titles and images on them, and tracking which ones people clicked on the most and submitted payment requests on.
Social networking has become too big to die out, which leaves people with one very simple decision to make: either join in or get left behind. For anyone promoting a service, product, business or anything that they want to earn income from (ie. their job), to not be involved in social networking is the equivalent of career suicide. Email lists are great, but come on, how many of those emails go right into the persons junk folder and get deleted without being viewed? Also, in an email, the person has to open it up, click the link to bring up a website, etc, where on Facebook, you can put up a post with a video in it, a picture, a whateverthehellyoucallit, and people don’t have to navigate away from the page to see it. It just makes sense.
To that extreme, if you’re reading this and haven’t added me as a friend, what are you waiting for!??! I pretty much only publish the blog on my website, Facebook and LinkedIn, so add me if you want to see the new updates. If you have a blog and I don’t have you as a friend on Facebook, I’ll probably never get to see it, comment on it, rip it apart, or anything to that extent. Or you can continue to hunt through Google for some of the old keywords “Dean Somerset,” “3 Spectrum Fitness,” “Awesomest trainer alive,” or my personal favorite “Diesel McSexiness.” Okay, maybe not, but you should probably still add me. This way I can see what you’re up to as well.