Social Media: A Measured Approach to Measurement
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Written By Noah Mallin | March 17, 2009 | Share This
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There is an ongoing debate on Twitter and Facebook, among other sites, about how to value the number of people who follow you, or who you are friends with. If you believe spam marketers (of all kinds), the value is found in size – “I got 10,000 followers in 3 days on Twitter” reads one profile. As we have said before, when it comes to social media size isn’t everything.
Similarly, Reprise Media’s Managing Partner Peter Hershberg followed up his article last Friday in Silicon Alley Insider talking about how social media sites need to find their way to give marketers value if they expect to get paid, with a new article in Advertising Age that explores the fallacy of assuming that site traffic referrals necessarily translate into marketing spend. In other words, size of traffic isn’t everything.
These are obviously related topics. Indeed many sites are seeing social media referrals outpacing what they might be seeing from search but touting this trend as the death of Google (as many are doing) is a step too far. The reason is clear enough – as we said yesterday in looking at Pete’s article for SAI – many social media sites simply haven’t figured out how to monetize in a way that adds value to marketers.
As Pete says in the AdAge piece:
“Social networks do drive huge amounts of traffic, but the campaigns we — and many other marketers — run typically don’t involve paying a site money, largely because the paid ad programs they have offer no real incremental benefit to our clients (through data, targeting, etc.) above and beyond what we’d get for reaching out to people in a more direct fashion.”
When social media sites fail to offer marketers these alternatives, money is spent all right – but not necessarily at the expense of dollars that would go to Google. More importantly it doesn’t go into the coffers of the social media platforms either. The case can even be made that it leads to more SEO attention from sites that want to ensure that their content is discoverable on search engines, where they can then be shared across social media and continue to drive traffic.
Meanwhile those “Death of Google” obits will have to go back into the draft folders.
To be clear, Pete is saying in both pieces that, long-term, social media sites have the potential to marry marketing and dollars in a way that makes everyone (including the communities that use the sites) happy. After all, as Fred Wilson points out on his blog, search engines eventually figured out a workable paid search model but it was a model that built on what the strengths of the search platform are, rather than trying to force marketing dollars into an ill-fitting model.
Questions or comments? Feel free to leave them here or check out Reprise Media folks on Twitter.
Topics: Google, Reprise Media, SEO, Social Media, Twitter |