"Word of Mouth" Meets "Word of Mouse"

If you are at all involved with marketing, particularly in the interactive venue, you have heard both terms. Yesterday, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, took these ideas one step further in formally unveiling marketing campaigns that combine the two, further propelling the growing popularity of social networking. He calls this new trend pull marketing in which consumers voluntarily endorse the brands and products they like. As reported in AdAge (November 6, 2007), he unveiled a system in which marketers can marry an ad message to a user-initiated endorsement of a product or service The idea behind this new venture expands on the notion of peer-to-peer brand recommendations combined with paid advertising from actual companies. Ads will be served up via news feeds based on criteria on member's profiles (movie interests, age, activities, etc) or if that member has had a friend endorse that brand. From the marketer perspective, this allows for more control of what audiences receive their messages which allows for more efficient advertising. Additionally, corporations are to take it one step further by creating their own brand pages in which users can write on their walls and endorse products. This method has been successful for many non-profits to recruit members as well as fundraise. Facebook Beacon a new feature will allow marketers to link members activity on their site with activities on Facebook. For example, if you add Saw III to your Blockbuster queue, the next time you log into Facebook, you will receive a notification if you would like to share that movie choice with friends. If you say yes, the recommendation gets sent to you friends and in the future, one might receive an AdServe when a new horror film is released. I believe this new or more refined approach to online marketing could be an extremely effective way to advance and utilize the popularity of social networking sites while at the same time allowing marketers to have some control of the messaging and endorsement of their products (via company paid ad buys). And in this day and age where most consumers have been desensitized to a lot of traditional marketing methods, this could be the new approach to grabbing consumers attention. Additionally, since Facebook does gather a great deal of data from its users marketers have can be as broad or narrow in marketing its products. I think this will eliminate a lot of the annoying non-relevant ads that users tend to ignore. Just like the thought behind social networking sites is to provide content that is relevant to each user, online marketing should follow this successful trend. Facebook Beacon intends to do just that. To learn more about this, visit http://www.facebook.com/press/releases.php?p=9166