 What impact will social media have on digital marketing? That was the question on my mind as I walked into ad:tech Sydney in Australia last month - and I was about to take a few steps closer toward finding out the answer. During the conference, I sat in on two enlightening panel sessions focused on social media that featured representatives from Facebook, Friendster, LinkedIn, Myspace and Bebo.
Applications, Mobile and Revenue
During the first session I attended, there were three themes that dominated the discussion: applications, mobile and revenue.
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Applications: Similar to Salesforce's application exchange, all of the social networks are adding applications to their networks, and agree that apps provide online marketers a valuable way to reach target audiences.
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Mobile: Most of the social representatives expect half of their traffic to come from mobile in the next 2-3 years, and all agreed that mobile tops their growth segments. The rep from Friendster said that their social network now receives around 1.5 billion impressions per month from mobile visitors.
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Revenue: All of the social networks are also focused on being able to target their data in a way that will help online marketers reach more precise micro-markets, allowing them to increase their revenues.
Marketing to Disparate Online Identities
 Some of the social network representatives mentioned that they saw a near-term divergence of consumer identities across applications. For example, some people want their Facebook identity, which may be more personal in nature, to be kept separate from their LinkedIn identity and network, which is more business-focused. They noted that this is important to online marketers because it ostensibly makes it more difficult to put consistent marketing messages in front of the same consumers in different applications. One way that they suggested approaching this issue was to focus on presenting your authentic brand to your target market, no matter their location on the social media landscape.
Monetizing Social Networks
The other social networking session I attended was also very interesting, focused on how companies can monetize social networks. According to Michael Arrington from TechCrunch, some bloggers are now making more than $2 million a year by generating revenue from social networks! Most companies I know wouldn't want to turn down that kind of revenue.
Some of the panel members’ suggestions for monetizing social networks included:
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Add a widget to your site: Incorporate an eBay or Amazon.com widget into your own blog or MySpace page to generate revenue as the result of your site's visitors making a purchase.
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Create engaging widgets with built-in virality: For example, Macy's has a widget on Facebook that lets users incorporate their own photos into a Macy's ad, then send it to their friends - thus, giving people a way to share a discount or simply point out an article of clothing they like. The click-through rate on this kind of ad is very high, because it truly engages people.
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Don't forget the gamers: When considering social opportunities, don't forget the communities formed around online multiplayer games - they form an equally strong and vital social network. Some companies are getting involved in the gaming community by offering game 'currency' that lets people buy better weapons or other perks in exchange for filling out a company survey.
ad:tech Sydney was a great opportunity to learn about advances in social networking from the networks themselves. I know we'll keep these insights in mind as our own company interacts with the social networking environment – and your company can benefit as well by following Lyris’ own thought leader on the topic, Erick Mott. Read his recent articles and blog posts here on LyrisHQ.com and elsewhere on the net, including:
Also, stay tuned to LyrisHQ.com for our upcoming webinar in June 2009 on the topic of social media marketing and community building, with guest speaker Erick Mott and other industry experts.
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About the Author
Brian Bailard is senior vice president of global sales for Lyris. With more than 20 years sales and management experience, he is responsible for driving Lyris' global sales effort.
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