Advertisers Face Hurdles on Social Networking Sites

Advertisers Face Hurdles on Social Networking Sites

Marketing in today’s world is a relentless, and often tiresome reality.  Everywhere you go you see “brand.”  Let’s start in the morning.  You wake up to the sound of you Sony alarm clock, and you get in the shower to use your Dove products.  When you get out of the shower, you get into your Ralph Lauren suit, tie your Armani tie, and pour yourself a cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee from your Cuisinart coffee machine.  All of these items display the brand name and brand image for you and the rest of the world so by the end of the day, these companies should be paying you to be a walking advertisement.  There isn’t anything wrong with this, but it is just the name of the game. 

 

But the effects of these advertisements dull over time.  None of these things have the same flash they had when they were new, and therein is the challenge for the marketer.  How do marketers penetrate the market with their brand identity or make the market aware of a new product?  They have made every experience throughout the day a brand experience, and the World Wide Web is not safe from that monster.  Banner ads, in text ads, and other kinds of online ads have been around for quite some time, but sometimes people might just luck into that advertising.  How do you reach exactly the right market segment with exactly the right product?  What kind of website would have a database that easily defined?  The answer is simple.  Social Networking sites.

 

The Social Networking Site, at face value, appears to be the greatest gift to marketers.  Let’s look specifically at Facebook.  Users give a large amount of information about themselves: Age, location, race, religious views, hobbies, and so on.  This is the easiest market segmentation ever devised.  You can search for any characteristic or any combination of characteristics. 

 

What’s better is the amount of time people spend on these social networking sites.  People spend many hours a week checking facebook by looking at pictures, reading wall posts, sending stickers, or just stalking people.  This is a captive audience.  This should be a marketers dream!

 

Apparently not.  Many advertisers feel that people ignore the advertising that shows up on their Facebook homepage.  According to the New York Times article, “Seth Goldstein, co-founder of Social Media Networks, an online advertising company, wrote on his Facebook blog that a banner ad ‘is universally disregarded as irrelevant if it’s not ignored entirely.’”  This is something that I can verify.  Every time I go on Facebook, I completely ignore the advertising.  This is a place people want to go spend time experiencing their friends, not a place to have marketing invade. 

 

This is not the best way to get people to turn to your product.  If you want to be successful marketing on these sites, it needs to be catchy and funny.  It needs to be something that members will send to each other to laugh about.  People aren’t going on Facebook to think about what kind of laundry detergent they need, they are going on to look at their friends, and laugh, and comment on pictures.  So what do you advertise?  Probably cameras and beer.  Why?  Because the beer will make people do something worth taking a picture of.

Stross, Randall. "Advertisers Face Hurdles on Social Networking Sites." New York Times. 13 Dec. 2008. New York Times. 15 Dec. 2008 pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=technology>.