L.i.S.A. 08 (Lessons in Social Advertising) Panel Recap & Notes

Posted by Justin Thiele on May 29th, 2008

Last night I attended the L.i.S.A. 08 (Lessons in Social Advertising) Panel. L.i.S.A. is a 4 city panel discussing how businesses and consumers use social networks and where the opportunity lies to connect. I have been to a few of these types of event and panels and increasingly I am realizing that there is no secret to social marketing. The users need to “invite” your brand into their circle. Gaining that acceptance boils down to 3 major aspects:

  1. Content - provide content that your customers are interested in and is relevant to your business
  2. Authenticity - being transparent, trustworthy, and credible
  3. Help users socially connect with you and the community. Make it easy for them to use your service.

If you are not into the whole brevity thing. I have compiled my notes from the event below. I hope you can find a useful bit in there.

L.i.S.A. 08 (Lessons in Social Advertising) Portland, OR May 28, 2008

Moderated by: Kent Lewis, President of Anvil Media

Panel:

John Furrier Furrier.org former CEO of PodTech
Michael Berkley - CEO of SplashCast
Dave Allen - Director, Insights & Digital Media of Nemo Design - formerly the bassist of Gang of Four
Hashem Bajwa - Director Digital Planning at Goodby, Silverstein & Partner

What is social advertising?

Enlists consumers to help tell your story
Building ambassadors to evangelize
Brands being invited in by consumers
Being accepted by the conversation
Web 1.0 was about website, self service, Web 2.0 is all about relationships
How do people communicate - peers, groups, context to the person

Interesting way: Using the “old media” model alongside social media - YouTube presidential debates

Wrong way: Budwieser spent millions to build Bud.tv, but the almost all of the ad views are on YouTube

Creating content for social media in your down time - HungryMan a production company has produced videos in their off time to post on YouTube that have been extremely popular

Do banner ads on Facebook constitute social advertising or is it old media model?

Clickthrough’s on MySpace and Facebook are extremely low
Would argue that this is still the “old media” view. A banner ad is a push ad. It is not social.

Just spamming your ad on a banner doesn’t work, you must be invited in. Consumer: “I want to be associated with this brand” & “I want to talk about this brand with my friends”

Companies need to understand and adjust for the “real time” environment we are in. How can you use this to add value to the user.

How is social marketing different from product placement?

Product placement is not authentic
Right way: Red Bull - gets popular athletes to organically promote & endorse
Endorsement in the community by a major player and influencer
Endorsement is one of the most cutting edge techniques right now

How does a brand get invited or be accepted?

Brands have fans that want to be associated with them
Start out with the consumer in mind
Example: people on Facebook care about recycling - HP focuses on recycling. Where is the connection

What do the customers think and care about
The metrics to measure social advertising are terrible. We can measure everything, but we don’t know WHAT to measure

Find your value and figure out how to apply it to social media. Understand your niche do something remarkable and the marketing and social media takes care of itself. You need to figure out what you want to do and accomplish.

How do you measure distributed content?

Are you gaining brand ambassadors
Track influencers (super distributors) - how many of their friends saw it and added it to their page
No one is more authentic than a friend
Build commerce into the distribution model

Brands must get invited into a social network that already exists. They can’t develop their own network, because it will automatically be viewed as an advertisement and inauthentic. The users won’t come.

Always put out content!

Content about your value proposition
People come from search - they find you on their own
Get in front of the eyes that are looking for you. Don’t try to make people look for you.
“The content is the ad”
Whoever creates the best user value win

AUTHENTICITY must be a core value

User experience is also key. What does my target audience look like? Jacob Nielsen is a usability guru.

The internet is an opt-in network. Aided (search engines) and unaided (offline marketing) awareness.

Single user on a small site can be a carrier to a bigger site and spread a message / opinion

Let the users do what they want to do. Stay out of there way. Let them talk to each other and try to measure it.

Be part of the experiments or at least talk with the people who are. Tap into the people who are doing interesting stuff.

Recommended Books

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
Word of Mouth Marketing by Andy Sernovitz
Meatball Sundae by Seth Godin
The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki
Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky

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