Agriya

For success in the world of social networking, exactly how aggressive do the marketing strategies employed have to be? Get this, the hub that seemingly captures the most news on every kind of medium, Twitter, gets less than 2% of all social network traffic today from US residents, according to statistics published on Experia. Twitter does grow with remarkable tenacity, posting a ten-fold growth this year; but where does that take it – to a grand total of less than 2%. So what does the scoreboard look like among the social network giants? Surely no one could have beaten Facebook and Twitter?

As it turns out, Facebook is unbeaten in what is almost 60% of the market. We have all been regaled with news reports of the death knell of MySpace for about a year now – how they departed from their roots in music in attempting to become a major social networking hub, and were snubbed by users for turning their backs on their musical origins. MySpace actually is not doing badly at all; it finishes second with about a third of the market, though it’s user base has shrunk considerably. The surprise bronze medalist in the race is the relatively low-profile Tagged.

“Why Tagged?” one may ask. What have they done? How could they have beaten Twitter? Twitter gets such glowing press and the best that Tagged got to do all year was to get negative press for an e-mail scam earlier this year and their hard sell tactics in getting memberships up. Perhaps all the hard-edged tactics have worked. Not only is this company getting sign-ups, it is also retaining those members with great page view statistics, time spent statistics, and financial profitability.

Twitter finishes last in the top four. Has there been a data error totaling up the numbers? How does all the great press Twitter receives about addictive tweeting not get it better rankings? It is possible, in fact that Twitter is merely a master at working the press.

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The thing about the Internet is that in sitting in your home, putting your thoughts and personal information out, you are tricked into believing you have privacy; and in a password-protected Internet life how easy it is to take for granted how vulnerable we become without it.

Everyone has elderly relatives who need to be in on all that happens in the lives of the children in the family – birthday parties, school events; often, to help the technically uninitiated elderly relative, people just post their children’s pictures and videos on a place like Facebook without password protection or even on a YouTube clone website. They figure that their video is lost in the crowd of millions of others; what predator is really going to find it?

People only wake up to how easy it is for people to find it, when things get out of hand; people anywhere on earth roam the Internet, put together freely available media files and use them for anything – for a school project, for plastering all over the walls of a city a thousand miles away to advertise a baby show, or merely to share among friends. It can be very easy to let one mistake get out of hand.

Even where personal views on the subject tend to the liberal, there is always the serious consideration of how other people might react to your media-posting activities. Birthday party pictures, school event videos and the like, usually include images of other people’s children too. People take a dim view of having decisions about their children taken without their consent. If the parent of a friend of your child’s finds a picture of his child at your child’s birthday at a recognizable restaurant or park, they can right away worry about how a sick predator out there can find their child if they wish to. There’s also the matter of setting a good example for your child in online safety; if you go about posting personal pictures at random on the Internet, how will you ever tell your child to exercise caution himself?

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It used to be that you would expect to have an e-mail account or three, you would receive a few messages everyday from work or from your friends, you would sniff when you saw the Spam folder say “100 New Messages”, every week, and you would consider your e-mail existence pretty fulfilling. On the other hand, there is life on the Twitter and Facebook plane that sees your Inbox full with wonderful emptiness every 15 minutes. The social media craze has not gone unnoticed as a potential area to capitalize on, in the search engine war between Bing and Google.

Microsoft’s tested the waters first in this area; there is now a special Twitter search option on Bing. When you search with this service, the results page shows a pretty hysterical cloud of tags of hot Twitter topics, along with a swarm of relevant shared links to them. You can even search among the search results you get.

Google won’t be left behind of course, having put down arrangements with Twitter. It says it plans to show Twitter search results among its regular search results; this innovation could be a few weeks coming though. But there’s not nothing quite like The Google Social Search feature that Google has planned; you could probably guess that it’s a Google Labs project yet again.

Google’s Social Search is for Google account holders only; when an account holder performs a regular search, Google looks up everything that your Twitter pals may have put up on the subject you searched for and gives you that information too. Now this is not exactly an all-new feature the way you might imagine, seeing it appear on Google’s Labs. Search websites like Crowdeye have been letting you search for Twitter results for quite a while now. It’s just that having the major search engines do it helps you do all your searching in one place. Will great new startups like Crowdeye be crowded out of the market they helped create, by the majors? Only time will tell.

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With the rising dominance of Social Media in the lives of consumers marketers are jumping on to the bandwagon and coming up with countless new ideas and strategies to target the supposedly transformed consumer behavior. However, social commerce strategies to drive sales and increase customer loyalty, once implemented have rarely performed as expected or produced measurable results. Unlimited targetability was the premise of both B2B and B2C social media marketing, but consumers turned out to be too unpredictable for such strategies to succeed.
Apparently, consumer behavior can only be best understood and acted upon in scale by grouping similar consumers together. Human behavior is fairly simple and simple models of behavior almost always outperform complex models. One-on-one marketing is good in theory but almost impossible to implement.

This is the golden age of data. Nearly any media metric can be measured and data mining produces quantities of data, however, without substantive data knowledge and proper modeling the data is mostly worthless. As, Eric T. Bradlow, co-director of UPenn’s Wharton Interactive Media Initiative, says, “Many social commerce problems have been addressed previously, and massive amounts of data will not change the continuing need for the understanding of basic and primitive customer behavior which provides the correct lens to view social media data.”

Mass marketing has lost favor in the face of social media marketing and viral marketing. However, mass marketing is still the most effective technique available though it is important, considering the proliferation of media channels, to ensure that the right media channels are selected. Social media marketing requires that very huge numbers of social media users share product recommendations for any significant impact and the same goes for viral marketing. These techniques may be effective for B2B marketers who have concentrated markets but rarely have much impact on B2C marketing. Rarely does the buzz created by such strategies translate in to product purchases.

Content is important but it has impact only if it reaches consumers. Traffic driving strategies such as referral programs must be the cornerstone of marketing policy. Many people try using the “Long Tail” (items which individually sell only in small quantities) niche driven marketing as one way to boost sales but such investment should be made only if justified by volumes.

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