Behind the Buzz - digital and interactive advertising and marketing

Marketing on Hyped platforms

by Rachel on January 3rd, 2008

Last year, Second Life was all the rage. Almost every conversation I had about ‘what to do online’ drifted over to Second Life at some point. It was hot and brands (or was it just the creatives at the agencies) had an urge to be there. For the PR, for the eyeballs they thought they would get, because their competitors were there but very rarely for how they could use it to interact with their customers in a new and innovative way and change the way they thought about them, change from mass eyeballs to individual avatars they could engage with.

So it’s no surprise to me that Motorati, the Pontiac island in SL, has closed. Even though the Pontiac was one of the better places, being active instead of just a passive building, it was still probably regarded as part of a marketing campaign. Many of the other brand presences are seen in the same way. They’ll have been thought up as part of the annual planning cycle, jumped on as part of the bandwagon, built and then mostly abandoned. How many of them actually had people present to offer a service, to interact with people who were interested in their brands. That planning cycle is over, the money and hype has moved on and the islands are closing.

The latest hype is Facebook, especially with their new ad tracking and serving technology. Once they opened up the application to all comers, moving beyond the college- and then business- focused demo, the ‘early adopters’ moved in, the tech and the press who then hype up the service. You get PR and then you get the brands takign a look. The latter half of the year saw a lot of conversations about presence on Facebook and you saw a lot of companies paying for profiles and apps on the service, again with very mixed results. Most tend to fail. Again, presence is seen as a marketing buy, tied into a campaign, which works sometimes but only if you understand the dynamics and provide additional utility instead of just treating the audience as eyeballs. (By the way, I tend to see targeted, relevant advertising as utility; if it’s something I’m looking for the ads are just more information for me)

Over the last few weeks, I’ve seen a number of the early adopters speak out against Facebook, declaring it was no longer working for them or pushing it to the limit. The same people were some of the most vocal fans. The app it self has changed minimally except for the data sharing that comes with Beacon, but that is not why they tend to move against it, although it is part of the reason. It’s the social aspect of the app that usually becomes problematic - the behaviour of other people with their pokes and their bites and their invites. It can get too much. Add to that the comercialisation as brands jump into the pool of captive people all of whom are sending a rich data stream to market against and the early adopters move on to the next thing, leaving in their wake a whole bunch of people. Some will follow off the service, others jumped and used it a few times and never again. Others, they key to this, will stay; they’re happy with the utility, they use it with a small group of friends and it works for them, they’re not edge cases that push and push the seems of an app, they don’t particularly care about the data leaking or not being able to move it with them, they like what they have.

As a marketer, these are the ones that will be your core audience if you want to move onto a hyped platform. Some things to consider:

• Is your presence tied into a marketing campaign, with timebound budget? Then design something that is timebound, that sets expectations that you’re there for a certain amount of time, they does not raise the desire in customers to have you there always. This means that when you leave, it won’t leave a bad taste behind. This is of course assuming that you have something that people are interested in.
• Is your presence longterm? remember you need completely different metrics to a campaign based site, far closer to those used in measuring customer service activity than marketing. It’s about engagement and interaction, not reach and frequency
• Know who you are after. The early adopters, who can hype a service, leading to it getting the PR you may be craving or the core audience, who come after (or in the case of facebook were there first). Set your expectations and communications plans accordingly
• Understand that in the web world, the next big thing is only a few months away and you most likely won’t be aware of it yet as your average digital agency. If you follow hype as a tactic, don’t sink everything into today’s news.

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POSTED IN: Buzz Marketing, Engaging the Customer, Social Networks