Filed under: facebook — kevin @
Social marketing is a non-linear, viral, social, multi-directional, and interactive means of enhancing brand recognition and increasing brand engagement.
Social marketing is not simply buying a banner ad campaign that runs on a social network, nor is it a branded widget. Done right, social marketing takes advantage of all the viral communication channels on social networks to provide an engaging experience that grows non-linearly and organically over the life of a campaign.
For example, Electronic Arts (EA) contacted us last year to build a Facebook version of their Smarty Pants console game for the Nintendo Wii. [context] first ported the game functionality to the Facebook platform. Using 22k questions from the console trivia game, we built an online version of Smarty Pants by adding a timer, awarding users points for answering quickly, and advancing users levels for playing more games. But simply porting the game would not have acheived EA’s goals, nor would it have made for an effective social marketing program.
Through the addition of social features: friend challenges, individual game rankings, and leaderboards of users’ friend, [context] was about to make the game flow smoothly from person to person, adding a viral aspect that would have been near impossible to achieve outside of a social network.
So what happened? Within 3 months over 300k people played over 2.5M games of Smarty Pants. This is 100% viral growth. Media spent: $0
Another example - Microsoft wanted to engage users on Facebook. Microsoft Office products aren’t particularly social, nor do they have inherent consumer appeal. But together with McCann Erickson we adapted a concept already popular on Facebook: the poke. Microsoft’s Office Poke application lets users throw staplers, steal chairs, shred documents, and fetch a donut – all as ‘poking’ actions on Facebook. In the first month over 100k users installed the application and sent over 40k branded pokes per day – and about half of the users joined through viral growth (not the media spend).
Why is this important? Because today I was speaking with someone who works in social marketing who was explaining to me that it didn’t matter how viral an application is; to distribute an application and encourage installation across social networks advertisers buy impressions from ad agencies on a CPM basis, and regardless of how effective the application is the advertiser is still getting its value through the paid impression.
But that misses everything that’s interesting and exciting about social marketing! What about the 2.5M games of Smarty Pants and the tens of millions of impressions that those games created? What about the 40k daily Microsoft Office-branded pokes? The value isn’t in the paid ad impressions – the value is in the FREE ad impressions!
Users discovering a console game or interacting with Microsoft Office 2007 messages via social applications are unique from most typical advertising in that:
- Messages sent via friends inherently more engaging than messages received through banner ads
- Consumers are spreading brand messages on the brand’s behalf (extending the media buy 1x, 2x, or 5x times)
- Each action a user takes results in more branded messages disseminating through the social network’s viral communication channels – news feed and mini-feed stories, profile views, requests, etc. All free brand impressions.
Hence the vCPM is born: the viral CPM. The viral CPM takes into consideration all the impressions that derive from the ad campaign – both paid and non-paid. For example, let’s look at a $250k ad buy:
Traditional model:
Agency spends $250k on an ad buy at say $5 CPM. Over the course of the campaign shows 50M brand impressions. Great!
Social marketing model:
Agency spends $200k on an ad buy and $50k on a viral application (the new creative or ad unit). The $200k buy gets 40M brand impressions. Great!
But instead of leading to a microsite, the ad buy directs users to an app. Let’s assume the reasonable rate of $0.50/user through the ad buy. Now the app we’ve built has 400k users. Cool!
And if we’ve built the app in the right way, each user is inviting a friend, or two, or three. Let’s say two. Now we have 1.2M users of our app. Awesome!
And if the app is engaging, we might get a 10% daily active user rate, maybe at first. So let’s say 120k are using the app, and sending a couple actions per day that result in stories in the news feed, or requests, or messages. And if those are seen by a half dozen of their friends, then we have another 43M brand impressions from the campaign. Wow, that’s double what we started with!
And it gets better than that. Because these impressions are better received (because my friend challenged me to Smarty Pants), the interactions are more engaging (I’m actually playing the game, not just seeing the ad), and it’s ongoing – these calculations are just the first month, but the application now lives on, constantly generated news feed stories and branded impressions. For free.
So the vCPM for this theoretical campaign, over the course of 3 months (assume the app isn’t interesting and people lose interest and the app dies within 100 days), we’ve taken what was a $5 CPM campaign and turned it into a $1.5 vCPM campaign. Or said the other way, social marketing created over 3x the brand impressions for the same $250k (and arguably more valuable, interactive, and engaging brand impressions at that).
Social networks have created a new channel for non-linear, viral, social, multi-directional, and interactivee marketing. Existing units of measurement and pricing are falling short of recognizing the value of these social branded interactions, and are ignoring the value that viral applications can bring. Forget CPM or CPC, vCPM is the real opportunity.
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