influencing each other through social media. The focus is on the social influencers influencing each other and not on the PR professionals influencing people in the social media realm. The difference is that as consumers, we’re trusting and depending upon each other more for advice than on large corporations. The PR professionals, for all their sincerity and skill, will still push a company’s message as forcefully as they can — and in that, it conflicts with social media marketing. But still, here’s something extremely important to consider: The more forward-looking public relations experts approach PR from a broader communications perspective and have taken the time and energy to understand the space deeply. Those who do that are much better equipped to understand and market through social media than other professionals.
Is there a remedy for conflicts between departments? Not necessarily, but as you deploy social media marketing campaigns, be sensitive to the fact that your goals and aspirations may be in conflict with your PR organization if it hasn’t embraced social media or social media marketing. Have a conversation with its staff early on, find ways to collaborate and delineate boundaries, too — who does what, who reaches out to whom, and how much space is given to authentic social influencers to do the influencing versus the PR professionals. And as you do this, keep in mind that for many PR professionals, social media marketing is an evolution of PR. That’s a good thing, providing for even more opportunities to collaborate. And, of course, remember that you may have peers in the public relations department who could teach you a thing or two about social media marketing as well!
Online advertising
When it comes to buying online advertising (also referred to as digital media planning and buying) on websites where your customers spend time, social media marketing plays an important role. Online advertising is about identifying websites that your target customers visit, buying ad space on those websites, and then measuring how much those ads are viewed and clicked. It’s as much an art as it is a science because knowing which sites your customers visit, where they’re most likely to engage with an advertisement (where on the site as well), whether the site charges the appropriate amount for the advertisement, and how much that advertising affects purchasing is not always easy. We work with media buyers all the time, and their jobs are harder than you think, especially in the world of digital ad exchanges, data management platforms, and remnant inventory. (Books could be written on each of those terms alone.)
But the online advertising space is important even in an economic downturn. The reason is simple: It’s one of the most measurable forms of advertising, especially in relation to print and television, along with search engine advertising. You can track those who view the advertisement, what they do with it, and in some cases, whether they eventually buy the product based on that advertisement. It’s no surprise that the relationship to social media marketing is an important one as a result.
This relationship with social media marketing takes various forms. Here are some of those connection points:
Market to the social influencers who surround the customer, as well as the customer.One of the ways in which you market to those influencers is using display advertising. So rather than just placing advertisements on websites that your customers visit, you place some advertisements (doesn’t have to be a large percentage of your budget) on websites that their social influencers frequent, too. Is this as measurable as those advertisements targeting your customers directly? Maybe not, because these influencers are less likely to click the ads and make a purchase. But nevertheless, they remember the brand and influence your customers.
Communicate and advertise on the social platforms — such as Facebook and YouTube — that your customers frequent.Most social platforms accept advertising in some form, and this serves as an important part of their revenue model. Figure 1-5 shows an eBay display advertisement on YouTube.Granted, display advertising on social platforms used to produce bad results (users didn’t notice the advertisements and didn’t click them), but the ad formats for social platforms are evolving, and today Facebook is the second-largest advertising platform on the Internet after Google. One example of the evolution, is video-based advertising in the Facebook newsfeed itself. Another innovation that has been honed over the last two years is where consumers are asked to like the ads that they’re viewing on Facebook, resulting in their action appearing more aggressively in the newsfeeds of their friends. This helps the platform target ads more appropriately to them in the future.
Use interactive social advertising.Think about this scenario for a moment: You visit a major website like www.cnn.com and see a large advertisement on the right side. The advertisement asks you to sign up for suggestions about local deals in your neighborhood. That’s an example of the ad unit becoming a platform for social interaction. There aren’t too many examples of social ads online, but we’re seeing more companies experiment in this space. Figure 1-6 shows how an ad appears on CNN’s website.
FIGURE 1-5: An eBay placement ad on YouTube.
Promotions
Promotions are another important type of marketing activity that’s affected by social influence marketing, owing to the fact that as people communicate with each other more, they have less time to participate in product promotions. But it also presents unique opportunities for marketers to put the potential of social influence marketing to good use.
FIGURE 1-6: Advertising on CNN.
Consider this: Promotions are primarily about incentives that are designed to stimulate the purchase or sale of a product in a given period. Promotions usually take the form of coupons, sweepstakes, contests, product samples, rebates, and tie-ins. Most of these promotions are designed as one-off activities linking the marketer to specific customers. However, by deploying social media marketing concepts, you can design promotions that require customers to draw in their social influencers, whether it’s to participate in the contest or sweepstakes with them or to play an advisory role. By designing the promotion to require social influencer participation (it needs to be positioned as friends participating), the specific promotion may get a lot more attention than it normally would have. What’s more, you can now design promotions geared directly to driving social influence among people in a given network. We discuss promotions in Chapter 4.
Taking Social Influence Beyond Marketing
As we hint in the earlier sections, the benefits of social media marketing extend beyond the core domain of marketing. If you harness the power of social influence marketing to change other parts of your business, you stand to gain the most. You can use SMM to mobilize groups of people to take specific actions, make marketers better corporate citizens, and further social change — and through those efforts, enhance a brand, too.
Using social influencers to mobilize
Social influencers obviously play an important role in getting people to do things. And this extends beyond the world of marketing. What makes social influence different on the web is that it’s a lot easier to do now. Author Howard Rheingold was one of the first thinkers
