Social Anxiety
I went to Lollapalooza this summer, and I fit right in.
The ticket came from a friend, and I declined at first, a little put off by the image of my gray head bobbing in a sea of shaved skulls and blond dreads. But I looked at the list of bands and realized that not only did I already know most of them, but I actually owned some of their albums: Wilco, Flaming Lips, Shins, Death Cab for Cutie. The signs pointed to yes, so I went.
And I’m glad I did. There were in fact plenty of gray heads there, along with a surprisingly large collection of crow’s-feet, spread waistlines, bifocals and bald heads that I’d swear had never seen a razor.
I won’t publish my age here, but let’s just say I’m old enough to have passed up a chance to go to Woodstock so I could take my college entrance SATs. But I’ve always been a pretty regular fan of live music. And while my concert-going has declined about as rapidly as my hearing, I still make a regular effort to get out to clubs and support the bands I follow.
On the other hand, I am too old for social networking. I’m far out of the demographic that’s interested in making new, unseen friends via the Internet; I have this column for that. But I can appreciate the impulse that’s led to the creation of MySpace, Facebook and the rest of the social networks. After all, the age group that makes up the overwhelming bulk of their membership has lived a large chunk of its life online. This really is their space, just as music festivals became ours after Hendrix hit Yasgur’s Farm (even for those of us who had to lie about being there).
And that’s what may make adding marketing to these social networks so difficult: Any attempt to monetize them is going to have to take a completely different approach, a kind of soft sell with attitude, than most marketers — and certainly most direct marketers — are accustomed to. If you think you’ve ceded control to the customer by using e-mail, wait until you see what you give up in social networks.
The concept of an offer, for one thing. Right now the companies most involved in social marketing, as it’s coming to be known, are more focused on building brand awareness than on selling directly. Burger King, Wendy’s and Jack in the Box have mounted MySpace profiles for their mascots. The Toyota Yaris, the Honda Element and Scion all have their pages too. (What’s the matter, Prius — too grown-up?) Jeep has built an elaborate MySpace profile page around a nationwide summer music tour they ran to promote the Jeep Compass — complete with interactive tour map, downloadable songs from the artists involved, and of course the inevitable album for photos of Jeep’s “friends.”
Yes, it’s branding rather than direct response marketing. You can’t buy a Jeep through MySpace. But that doesn’t mean opportunities don’t exist right now for a smart DMer to capture attention for a product or service with a social-marketing approach and drive traffic to a more hospitable DM environment elsewhere on the Web.
A study on viral marketing published last month by Jupiter-Research asked consumers how much trust they placed in different kinds of resources when researching a product online. Twenty percent of those who’d used public forums, including message boards and social networks, said they found them trustworthy about products. Granted, that was lower than both company Web sites (40% confidence) and retailer message boards or reviews (30%). But for trusted content, these channels still beat out Web ads (10%) and blogs (8%). If you’re doing Web advertising at all, you might be able to benefit from social networking.
Obviously, the openness that encourages MySpace users to add comments is exactly what seems dangerous to a lot of marketers. Tough. That’s the price you pay for taking part in this wave. You have to have enough confidence in what you’re selling or promoting to believe the bulk of your feedback will be favorable — and to realize that the occasional critic just makes you more credible.
On Jeep’s MySpace profile, out of 50 comments available right after Labor Day, 36 specifically said which Jeep model the owner drove and added that it either rocked or ruled. A band named Big Toe moves most of its gear in a ’98 Cherokee, and one friend says a family funeral “looked like a Jeep parade.” There are lots of members linking to the page to get a share of its traffic for their own MySpace sites, too — a sure sign that this profile is getting attention.
In fact, that may be the way MySpace and the other networks filter into the direct marketing scene in the short term — through Web links that draw traffic from relevant sites. Among the MySpace friends linking to the Jeep profile page is Gibby’s Pizza in Lewiston, TX, which invites “any peeps in a Jeep” to come on by with the top down and get 10% off their next order.
The recent deals that will bring Google and Microsoft search ads onto the social network sites should help clarify how they work as an environment for creating customers. But don’t kid yourself: As you read this, someone at Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft is thinking about the timetable for adding local or shopping search to those pages. And MySpace is inching toward its own e-commerce platform, with a deal to sell music downloads directly from the site. So the day may not be far off when social networking gets its own kind of social shopping.
My fellow decrepits and I fight the ravages of time by clutching onto the habits we formed when we were young, checking out music festivals, watching cartoons and dressing 20 years younger, even when that means resorting to Easy Fit jeans and hearing aids that look like Bluetooth earpieces. The demographic that’s made social networking such a phenomenon will age, too. Pretty soon they’re going to be more interested in furnishing starter homes than in finding a ride to Burning Man.
And if they’ve kept the social networking habit, that’s going to be one place they’ll look for trusted information about your product and what others are saying about it. If you’re smart, you’ll start experimenting now with ways to get in on that conversation.
