Trend: Social Network Marketing

Meta-Trend: Social Media

Social Network Marketing uses already established social networks to infiltrate the marketing message. Another way is to establish a social network around a brand or product.

Trend Description:
Using social networks as promotional tools is a pretty smart idea. The whole network is already set up. As friends are connected with friends of friends of friends, viral marketing is just a click away. People freely give away all kinds of information, starting with name, age and email-address, to hobbies, interests and almost everything else which is necessary to dig into the right target group. The challenge is not to interfere too clumsily, because that might scare away the users. Not many solutions are out so far, but marketers are starting to get the idea!

Cases:

MySpace and Fuse
Combining social networks and the concept of “American Idol” the Music network Fuse, the social network MySpace and the entertainment marketing agency Deep Focus launched a promotion to find the next big video star. Young musicians were invited to go to myspace.com/fuse and upload their video to the fuse group page on MySpace. After a first selection by judges from fuse and Deep Focus, everyone who clicks on the site can vote for his favorite video. The winner will receive airplay and promotion on fuse Video On-Demand and MySpace.

Friendster and Dreamworks
To promote the movie Anchorman, the Social-networking service Friendster partnered with DreamWorks and posted profiles of film’s characters on its Web site. The Friendster “faksterers” included fictitious details about the characters’ lives and could be contacted by any of the nearly seven million subscribers

POPstick Outburst
Like other social networking services such as Friendster, Tribe or MySpace, Outburst wanted users to create personalized profiles through which they could have interacted with each other. The core would have been a dashboard, which included a blog, discussion threads, small uploaded videos and interactive maps users could have been used to find brand-related events in their area. POPstick basically wanted to offer an online dashboard through which brand loyalists could have met and shared their enthusiasm for a given product or service. But nobody seemed to be interested enough. The concept did not work out.

Trend Impact:
Social Networks are a growing field, which open new ways of communicating and organizing one’s social contacts and social calendar. Although these networks naturally provide a great basin for marketers, there will always be the challenge of consumers’ natural suspicion toward marketing materials.

Links:

Fuse and MySpace

Friendster

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