And the real World Cup winners are…

Most readers will doubtless be aware of a certain kickabout that started in Africa on Friday.

Some brands have fallen into the age-old trap of spending $ms in official sponsorship, then throwing it away with an associated campaign that goes off the bland-ometer. Hello, Hyundai and Budweiser.

Others have been social and partnered with a sponsor to celebrate the event, like Ladbrokes in Spain, for whom we produced a simple, but eminently addictive, keepy-uppy game.

Also around the World Cup, the Tote embraced our avatar technology to generate 16 ‘pundits’ representing the leading contenders. Each gives a tongue-firmly-in-cheek assessment of their respective chances of lifting the trophy.

Finally, several sponsors have gone down the digital community route – such as Castrol’s effort by Saatchi’s and Continental’s tyre-some version. But none, we’d argue, have developed anything to hold a candle to Soccer Republic – the community we created for Ireland’s official sponsor, eircom.

Here’s to Thierry Henry keeping his (cheating) left hand tucked firmly by his side. Sacre bleu indeed.

Enjoy the tournament and don’t forget to follow our Twitter feed for social media highlights from around the tournament.

Links

Budweiser

Ladbrokes

Tote Sport

Castrol

Continental Tyres

Soccer Republic

Follow Yomego on Twitter

Boobquake – The power of the people

I was listening to a Canadian radio station the other day when I heard about the creation of Boobquake. Started by Jen McCreight a US blogger in response to Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi an Iranian Cleric how was quoted as saying that immodestly dressed women caused earthquakes. Jen’s idea was to get as many women as possible to dress immodestly on the same day and then track if this caused any noticeable difference to the number of earthquakes around the world.

Without any corporate backing or marketing money, Jen’s facebook page for the boobquake event currently stands at over 78,500 fans in less than a few days.

 By itself, this is some achievement but combined with other case studies it adds more proof the power of social media.

The original comments made by Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi were covered by a large chunk of the traditional media included the Guardian and the Telegraph and yet where was the mainstream media coverage of any response to it.

This is were social media comes in, imagine instead of an Iranian cleric it was a brand and imagine that brand made a comment people didn’t like. Before social media, mainstream media would ignore any response to that comment more often than not.

However, with the power social media can now wield, to gather and galvanise groups of people it is now very hard to ignore, just ask the Daily mail, or Nestle or even David Cameron. It is more important then ever for brands to not only choose what they say and when they say it but also to know what are people are saying about them.

To put your in the sand won’t work anymore, and to ignore social media you are not only ignoring a missed chance to connect with and potentially sell to your customers you may also be missing an attack which could cost you some serious money.

And just so you know immodestly dressed women don’t cause earthquakes.

Yomego’s New Year’s Resolutions for Social Media Strategy

The New Year is a fresh start for everyone. Christmas is a time of deadlines, as marketers make a final push to drive prospects into the sacred domain of consumption before the holidays begin. As soon as Christmas day and all its excesses are over, the sales begin, and companies purge their stocks in anticipation of the New Year. We all make resolutions, in the hope of becoming happier, healthier, better people, but maybe it’s time to start making resolutions towards becoming a better marketer.

Social media sins have been discussed, preached and blogged about all over the web, but now it’s time to start making positive, actionable promises for the New Year ahead.

So here are the social media resolutions all marketers should be making this year.

I will realise that my brand is not a story

It’s a hard pill to swallow, but the fact of your existence is not, in itself, notable. Your high-budget marketing campaign, your new online community platform, even your hot new product, is not enough to inspire editorial, blog posts, and user-generated content. What will it take to make your brand into a story that people want to tell?

I will put down my marketing megaphone, stop being a spy, and realise that social media is a two-way conversation

By now I’m sure we all realise that social media is about listening to customer conversations and unearthing actionable insight. But you can’t be a fly on the wall forever. Your customers and prospects know that you’re listening to what they’re saying, and they want a response. To establish a presence on social media platforms and then fail to engage with consumers can be almost as harmful as not having a presence at all.
Is there someone within your company who has the necessary  sign-off and persona to represent your brand and interact with these people?  In addition, social media is all too often left in the hands of a single department, when there is a growing need for online customer interaction to be diffused across company functions.  Does your marketing department use Twitter? Probably. But what about customer service, IT and the finance department?

I will segment my social media target audience(s) in the same way as I target my offline audiences
(I will stop trying to be everywhere at once.)

Many companies view online marketing as an alien limb, completely unrelated to every other (offline) element of the marketing mix, when it is actually a natural extension of it. Online audiences can, and should be segmented in the same way as offline audiences, and not just by the social media platform they use.  You don’t have to be present on every platform, just on the same platforms as your target audience.

I will fuel my social media campaign with free content

It seems obvious, but a fire needs fuel. If a campaign is to spread, it needs substance, in the form of free, easily – accessible, interesting content. This could span from YouTube videos to iPhone applications.  This content should be seeded across the platforms where the target audience of the campaign already congregate; the old motto of “build it and they will come” no longer holds water.

I will understand the difference between quantity and quality, and adopt meaningful KPIs ( I will try to put CPM to the back of my mind)

The hot topic of the year has been generating ROI from Social Media. It is important to remember, though, that not every company can earn $3m from Twitter like Dell has managed to.
Whilst the old adage is “What gets measured, gets done”, with social media “What gets measured wrongly, gets done badly”, is closer to the truth. Taking Twitter as an example, number of followers will never constitute a useful measure of performance. Anybody who has ever used the words “Affiliate Marketing” or “Personal Finance” in a tweet knows that Twitter followers are easy to come by. Attracting and retaining quality followers presents a whole new set of challenges.

I will remember Pareto and detox my client list.

Customers create revenue, and revenue is the lifeblood of any company. But it’s easy to lose sight of the importance of attracting and retaining profitable customers. Is the amount of time / effort you spend servicing your clients proportionate to the value they create for your firm, and if not, why not? The feeling of elation and achievement at having attracted a new customer can sometimes make it difficult to accept that not all customers are the right customers.

I will break the rules

Average social media campaigns will return average results. Going against traditional ideas and processes can be a very costly and time-consuming venture, but breaking the rules is how virals are made. No market analysis would ever expose the urgent need for a Meerkat-based advert, and no focus group would identify the influence that a drumming gorilla could have.

I will accept that where I plan to go with social media is almost never where I will actually end up

Nearly every social media advocate and strategist will try to emphasise the importance of planning a social media campaign. Of course it’s important to co-ordinate your efforts and establish a gameplan which is tailored and appropriate to your brand and your message. However, the very nature of social media means that the message you send out will rarely be interpreted in exactly the way you intended it to be: and that’s not necessarily a bad thing! Engaging with social media can give all manner of unexpected outcomes, and only a truly switched-on company will be able to recognise and respond to the opportunities and threats that social media can create.

Joe Hughes and Kirsty Bell

Can brands really trust third parties to control their digital communities

Over the past few years brands have become increasingly engage with using the big social networks such as Twitter and Facebook not only as a marketing and engagement tool but also as a home for their social media community.

For a while this seemed great, a ready built audience, on a platform you don't need to pay anything for a marketers dream.

Then a few years or so ago something happened. Social media suddenly got corporate. News Corp bought Myspace, Google paid $1.65bn for youtube and Ning is valued at $500 million. As the platforms get more serious and business like they slowly start to alter the way they work.

These platforms had shareholders and corporate owners who wanted to control the future of the platforms.

This really culminated in my mind this summer when facebook announced they would start removing publishing rights to so called "Generic pages". These generic pages in some cases are a spamming nuisance but in a lot of cases aren't. Facebook have been proceeding with this "generic page" purge over the last few months ands are in the process of crippling an estimated 500,000 pages. They have not you notice completely removed them merely stopped anyway for anyone who owns a page to communicate. So they still get the SEO pluses for the content and the additional traffic.

The purge Facebook has started has caught up an enormous number of genuine pages (certainly in the tens of thousands) and removed their rights as publish. To make it worse the only way for most page owners to communicate with Facebook is through a blind email with no SLA's or guidance as to when the page owner will receive a response.

In case you are wondering, I have seen this happen to a genuine page for a national brand and seen Facebook's lack of response when the issue has been raised with them.

Issue like this are really at the heart of why I don't believe the community itself should ever be hosted or run from one of the big networks.

If brands are taking social media seriously like Dell, South West Airlines, Starbucks and Bestbuy do then they need to ensure they have control over whether they can talk to their community or not.
Brands wouldn't dream of hosting their corporate websites in a Yahoo group, so why would you do the same with your community. Brands should certainly be using the big networks as that is where there potential audience is, but it should be where they find new people to part of their community; it should be regarded as a way to introduce your brand and your content.

With the cost of building social networks plummeting and tools like Facebook connect meaning people don't have to create new profiles or logins the question becomes as social media gets serious are brands serious about social media?

File sharing the end of an indsutry, or the start of one?

Yesterday I was reading Peter Mandelson’s latest attempt at trying to keep the big media distribution businesses going with a mixture of frustration and resignation. Ever since the advent of recorded music, the powers that be within the industry have been predicting every step forward in technology would end their business forever. Yet every time the industry has eventually managed to find a way to only to live with new technology but ot proper because of it, think CD's and DVD's for example.

So is file sharing really going to wipe out the music and film industry leaving tens of thousands of musicians and actors penniless?

Of course its not. These industries produce content and content has value.

This argument has never been about recording artists or actors. It has been about distribution. In the traditional media world, the company or entity that controls distribution controls the industry. The real threat that both file sharing in particular and the internet in general represents is the loss of control over distribution for the big music publishers and file studios.

Bands like Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead and the Arctic Monkeys have all used social media in different ways to either promote themselves or make direct revenue. Online services like Sellaband www.sellaband.com that Public enemy are now part of, show a completely different business model for music without the need for the majors.

Not only can bands directly promote themselves through social media and file sharing but it has also been shown that music pirates actually buy more music, in fact according to a study earlier this year by the BI Norwegian School of Management; http://tinyurl.com/d24bvx, music pirates are on average 10 times more likely to buy music legally.

The music industry however, has been very slow to produce the sorts of legal download services that consumers want.

As A consumer, I don’t want to pay as much or more for a digital product, which has no shipping or packing costs as I do for a physical disc. I certainly don’t want some form of DRM that prevents me choosing what platform I play my music on. At the moment it is so much easier for the average consumer to use pirated music then there legal alternative. 

There are some signs of change with platforms like Spotify appearing, although not that long ago another service Pandora was in effect banned in the UK so this forward march is by no means a certainty.

In Britain we seem to be missing the example from American were the RIAA has been using legal mechanism to attempt to stop piracy for years and despite a number of high profile cases piracy is still prevalent there.

The answer is to give consumers what they actually want and charge them a fair price, not to try convince, coerce or bully lawmakers into trying to prop up a business model that is doomed to fail.   

The king is dead long live the king?

I was at MIPCOM last week and talking to the great and good of the TV industry got me thinking will the internet replace TV or does TV just need to adapt.
For 50 years, the TV industry has delivered content and generated revenue effortlessly along the way. But technology is in danger of pulling its plug.

Can it alter its business model to chart a course into more profitable waters? Or is TV irreversibly sinking?

Advertising revenues are down and news that UK online advertising has overtaken TV doesn’t make the picture any brighter. And look at these facts and figures:
 
•    By 2010 Generation Y will outnumber Baby Boomers  
•    96% of generation Y in the first world have joined a social network
•    Years it took to reach 50 million users: Radio (38 years), TV (13 years), Internet (4 years), iPod (3 years).   
•    Facebook has added 100 million users in less than 9 months
•    The second largest search engine in the world, based on number of searches conducted, is YouTube
•    Only 14% of people trust advertisements
•    Only 18% of TV campaigns generate a positive ROI for advertisers

Okay, TV is facing some serious challenges, increased competition from online channels, new technologies, lifestyle changes – call them what you will – but cheer up, the business model might be on its last legs, but there's life in the old dog yet...

The answer for TV – embrace the online culture.

One billion consumers use social networks and the like. How can TV tap into the commercial potential of such vast numbers of people? The difficult part isn’t to create a presence; its knowing what presence should be created, where and for what purpose.

LISTEN CLOSELY
The truth is you're involved in the social media space whether you choose to be or not. Listen in to the online buzz in sites like Twitter, Facebook, You Tube, Flickr, the various forums, communities and blogs. Social media search engines like whostalkin, Social Mention, Delver or tuSavvy are great to use alongside Google analytics to get a good overview of your social media profile and performance. But for a detailed assessment, get a social media reputation audit done by a professional – you’ll be able to use this score as a benchmark for improvement.

START TALKING TO PEOPLE
Word of mouth - one of the most powerful forms of marketing, and it works so well online. If you’ve got something great - everybody’s talking about it. If you don’t - everybody’s talking about it. Before getting involved in social media, think carefully about your approach. Be prepared to share information or even tell the behind the scenes stories.

START SHARING YOUR CONTENT
Social media channels have a rather large ‘Welcome’ mat don’t you know and getting involved in this space will have a positive effect offline too. CBS has attributed a 200,000 increase in viewers in one month to the strategic placement of sample content on YouTube.

USE VIDEO PLATFORMS (DON’T TRY TO COMPETE AGAINST THEM)
YouTube probably presents the biggest threat but also biggest opportunity for content owners. Did you know that currently an average of 20 hours of video is uploaded every minute? OK, some of it may be there illegally, or poor quality, but audiences flock in their droves. Google, YouTube’s owner, has very deep pockets, so while it continues to build its audience, the commercial pressure is off (for now). And legal wrangles over copyright issues are unlikely to derail them, a recent ruling in Universal Music Group's copyright infringement lawsuit against Veoh Networks shows that social video sites may actually not be breaking any laws at all, at least not in the USA.   

Then there’s Monty Python who placed free clips on their YouTube channel with click-to-buy links underneath. It's reported that even though the online content is free, Monty Python's DVD sales skyrocketed 23,000% on Amazon and reached #2 on the Bestseller list.

DISCOVER NEW REVENUE STREAMS
Content has an intrinsic value. Viewers will subscribe to watch it (if it’s good enough), advertisers will pay to be labelled alongside it (for the right price), but the online model is still evolving.

But take Facebook - it has 300m users - audience figures are potentially not the problem - it’s all in the packaging. Subscriptions models using Facebook apps are a potential money-spinner for content owners. Users don’t want to pay multiple subscriptions to access content (hello, Hulu!) so multi-layered content for niche audiences just needs to find suitable homes.

CREATE ONLINE ONLY CONTENT
Broadcasters can show content on their websites, but this is only the starting point. Bebo has a track record for commissioning its own content (KateModern and Sofia's Diary), funded by tactical sponsorships and product placement.

Joe Hughes, Yomego – the social media agency.

Forget Twitter it's Google Facebook are after

With the $50million purchase of Friendfeed, Facebook has just bought itselfs a seat at one of the hottest tables on the internet – real time search. Friendfeed arguably has better technology then anyone else right now for real time and it is this and the talent pool Friendfeed has are the big prize here.

For some time now Twitter has been stealing a lot of headlines that Facebook may well feel should have belonged to it. Just look at The Iranian election for example everything was about real time search and publishing and twitter was there. Facebook whilst being used for similar purposes just couldn’t compete.

Facebook’s Purchase of Friendfeed will allow it to compete head on with twitter and it has a number of advantages. Firstly its sheer size twitter can’t even get close to Facebook’s users number According to compete.com in July Twitter had just over 23 million uniques users, that’s not a small number until you put it up against Facebook. In the same month Facebook had over 122 Million nearly 6 times the amount.

The next big advantage facebook has is financial, whether it makes money right now, Facebook does actually have revenue streams some $300 million or so is predicted for 2009, Twitter doesn’t. Facebook has also just had an invest of over $200 million by Russian company Digital Sky.

Finally, there is infrastructure; from the very start, twitter has had problems with its infrastructure. Being able to scale efficiently when you are dealing with millions of conversations is not easy. Facebook not only have much bigger server architecture than twitter they also have the engineers who are used to dealing with an entity the size of Facebook. 

Twitter though only looks like the first of Facebook’s targets and not the biggest. The big one for Facebook has to be Google.

Search is still the biggest area of online spend, just take a look at Google’s  Q2 results a staggering $4.07 billion. That’s over $4 billion in one quarter in the middle of the worst recession in living memory.

So what does Facebook’s purchase of Friendfeed have to do with Google and its search business?    

Real time search will become the next battleground as more user want to search for the best offers right now, news of what’s happening in Iran minute by minute or real time sports scores

Larry Paige one of the founders of Google admitted back in May that Google are behind with real time search.

Friend feed on the other hand were also very good at real time search and as an added bonus their founders are ex Google developers.  

Google are now stepping up their real tie search capability and their latest release “caffeine” certainly is more focused. This time it is Google who are on the back foot when it comes to search technology and in Facebook there is a platform with Money and critical mass that could now threaten the multi billion dollar revenues of Google.

Power to the people, United Airlines feels the power of social media

Lots of people always try to quantify the ROI of social media, how many extra sales will it get me? How much extra traffic will it get my website? Are these the right questions?
 
There are certainly ways to measure the effects of social media but concentrating purely on these measurements misses the point. Social media is much more than just trying to sell a few extra products. Social media is about connecting with your audience and if you don't know what people are saying about your brand things can go horribly wrong, horribly quickly.

The latest company to find this out is United airlines. In spring 2008 Dave Carroll lead singer of the relative unknown band Sons of Maxwell was travelling to Nebraska to go on tour, he flew by United airlines. During the flight his $3500 guitar was damaged, he spent the next 9 months talking to United Airlines trying to get compensation but was refused at every turn.
 
So after becoming increasingly frustrated with United Dave wrote a song and recorded a video about his experiences.
In a world without Social Media this probably wouldn't have mattered much, lucky we live in a world where social platforms are readily available. The video was added to Youtube; So far, this video has received:

Over 3.8 Million views

Over 26,000 people have rated it

Over 17,000 have left comments all supportive with a large number saying they will boycott United from now on

The Youtube video has now made its way onto traditional media including:

BBC

National News Australia

Rolling Stone Magazine

The Daily Mail

The Times

The song has also been released on iTunes and as of today is the Number 1 country track and if you care to do a quick Google search you should fine in excess of 6 Million other Websites, blogs, comments and links to the Youtube video. So if you are thinking about the value of social media think how much damage has just been done to United by its use.

Brands often spend enormous amounts of money creating and protecting there brand image, but often very little time money or effort is spent on the social media side of the brand. Social media is changing the dynamic between brands and their consumers. Never before have individual consumers had so much power and they are only just starting to exercise it.

Can any company truly say they get Customer service right 100% of the time? If they can't then they need to engage with social media in order to try and prevent something like this damaging their brand.

Link to Dave Carroll's site for the full story

Link to the Youtube video

Online subscriptions the beginning of the end?

Over the last couple of months the newspaper industry has seemed increasingly desperate to generate new revenue streams in particular from the internet. If you take a look at the revenue figures for newspapers it is easy to see why.

News Corp who own one of the worlds largest newspaper businesses saw Q1 operating profit drop 47% and they are not alone.

Since Murdoch initially mentioned the idea that newspapers should start charging subscriptions for their websites in May there has been a growing sense amongst the newspaper industry that a subscription model for online access to their content is the way forward.

So is subscription going to save the industry or is it yet another badly thought out attempt by an industry that doesn't really understand what is going on around them to grab revenue where it can?

You can probably tell from my choice of words that I don't believe this will save the industry.

Newspapers have done well up to now for two reasons, firstly the convenience of the format. Traditionally there where three primary platforms for absorbing news: TV, radio and newspapers and each of these had a very different format which where used at different times and in different ways.

Newspapers provided the ideal way to transport news. They where sized to be comfortable to read on a bus or a train, lightweight, cheap and easy to dispose of. You couldn't take a TV to work with you; you couldn't take a radio of a flight so the newspaper was perfect.

The second reason was the control and flow of information. In order to report news particularly news from a foreign country you had to get a reporter there, have researchers available to check facts and figures and a way to broadcast the information. This kind of operation cost a lot of money and required a large infrastructure. Newspapers where perfectly setup to take advantage of this structure and there where very few competitors.    

Internet technology and in particular Social internet technology have been eroding away the need for large-scale organization and at the same time increasing the number of devices, that news is accessible on.

Think laptops, netbooks, iPhones, your computer at home, your computer at work, in fact for a good deal of people, they are never more than a few clicks away from huge stores of information.  These stores of data are called websites and pretty much anybody can run one.

As soon as information is available on one website, it has the capability to be available on millions through technology such as RRS. Added to this platforms like twitter allow near instantaneous transmission of messages to potentially millions of people, meaning almost no information is unique.

The less unique information is the less valuable it is and information is newspapers currency. 

Much like the music industry of the late nineties and early two thousands, instead of finding ways to use this new technology to their advantage the newspaper industry is mostly trying to either ignore the problem or threatening to sue anyone they can find, usually Google.

Now that it is becoming increasingly obvious neither of these strategies is working, they are trying to fall back to the offline model of subscription.

Why not try something new, how about add-ons to their service?

An example of where they might want to start their thinking is already here have a look at Techdirt a professional online blogging network that has come up with a range of add-ons to help their newsgathering and analysis business. I am not suggesting that mainstream newspapers follow this exact model but to me at least its seems a lot better than anything they have come up with so far.

 If you want to read some more insight it is on my company website Yomego
 

Social media the end of the beginning

The future of social media is extremely bright, taking internet users to a point where social sites cease to become a place on the internet and start becoming the internet itself.

The sheer momentum behind social media is unlikely to slow down anytime soon, while the convergence of a number of critical factors are creating a pivotal moment for the online phenomenon.

The end of the beginning is nigh – and more importantly the future of social media is starting to take shape.

We have mass adoption, ubiquitous technology and considerable investment into social sites. These key factors, which are now all converging, will force the changes that will see the last barriers knocked down and the final challenges overcome: cross-compatibility, and profitable business models.

These trends will lead us to a point, where social sites cease to become a place on the internet and start becoming the internet itself.

More and more conventional websites are now incorporating social aspects such as user- generated content or social bookmarking. It is not a huge leap from here to the point where the entire internet is based around social sites and functionality.

In this new world, niche social networks will proliferate, brands will ‘do’ rather than simply ‘say’ and the internet will be defined by your preferences.

As these social spaces become our gateways to more and more content and interaction, a traditional approach to online brand advertising no longer applies.

Banners are out. In come advertorial-style content, branded apps and brand-led community sites.

Furthermore, brands will need to embrace new technology in tailoring their message to the right audience. If they get it right, the benefits in terms of brand engagement and mass advocacy are mouth-watering.

Platforms such as Google Wave and Netvibes are already giving us a glimpse of a future where users choose what information and data they want; a world where users filter data before it’s delivered to them, and customize the way it’s presented when it reaches them.

The next phase of the social media revolution offers huge potential for brands that get their strategy right, as well as pitfalls for those who fail to adapt. For end users, the good can only get better.

If you want to read more on this, I have just written a more in depth white paper on the subject that you can find here

It’s time to forget behavioural targeting of ads

Behavioural targeting has been heralded as the light at the end of the tunnel for the likes of Facebook and YouTube who still need to prove their commercial viability.
 
But as that promise unravels, it provides a timely reminder that the principles of off-line marketing do not necessarily apply online. The new world of social media dictates a completely different approach – people use to the power of community to rebel against  sneaky advertising and overt sales messages – so it might be time to forget behavioural targeting and move on.
 
Behavioural targeting offers a system to reach web users according to who they are and what they’re looking for. If advertisers could target consumers based on content and demographics, it was assumed that click rates and engagement should suddenly soar. Website owners could charge a premium. The accountants can sit back down.
 
But, as Facebook, Google, Phorm and others have been pouring money in to behavioural targeting there has been a growing concern amongst many sections of both government, NGOs and industry groups about how these systems work.
 
This has been brought to a head recently in the UK by Phorm’s secret trial with BT.

Phorm is a system which runs within an ISP’s networks and monitors every user’s behaviour. Based on these browsing habits, it alters what ads users receive.
 
There are major issues with this. Firstly, the trial itself was connected in secret and BT users who were ‘guinea-pigging’ the system without being informed at any point that they were being monitored. This is certainly illegal, at least according to the European Union, which is currently looking at taking legal action against the UK government, possibly Phorm and BT too.
 
Any trial run under these circumstances should start ringing alarm bells. Amazon, amongst others, has asked to be permanently removed from the Phorm system and it is widely expected other major online advertisers will start to follow suit.
 
There is however a bigger problem, especially from an EU perspective. European law on data privacy is amongst the most stringent in the world and all members have to have laws that match the EU directives.
 
If not already killed off by the Phorm trial, the 2002 European Privacy Acts will almost certainly be the end of behavioural targeting before it starts.
 
Unlike traditional forms of media, the web is an active experience, where a user actively chooses where to go and what to read or watch. In this environment ads are more naturally seen as an annoyance getting in the way.

Things have gone so far that browser Firefox has an ad blocker available as a free download which removes all adverts across every website.
 
Even adopting the opt-in route used in email marketing is not going to work in the long run.

Why, as a web user, would anyone choose to give advertisers all of their details for nothing?

And why would I choose to have my browsing experience interrupted by advertising at all?

I can already get all the content I want from millions of sources at zero cost.

Ultimately, passive, lazy advertising does not work in the social media space – indeed, it can do more harm than good and no amount of behavioural targeting will make the difference in a world that is shaped and reshaped by the consumer on an almost daily basis.

If advertisers want to engage with online audiences then they need to get creative. Far from being a no-go zone, social spaces offer the lure of huge traffic and plenty of opportunity to get involved, but brands need to regard them not as traditional websites. The people who inhabit them regard these spaces as places to express themselves and connect with people.

If brands want to join in with the engagement then they must be sympathetic to the nature of social spaces. Any activity must be able to provide a benefit to the community, not simply attempt to sell them something.

Successful social media strategies add value, presenting brands as facilitators, enhancing the experience for the end user. Rather than jump onto someone else’s network, more and more brands are choosing to create their own community spaces – and some are even being brave enough to take their logos off!