With a name like SocialMedia.com, it had better be good – right? The company called SocialMedia is launching a number of new advertising products today and they beg a question that could be fundamental to the financial viability of this new online world – do people want to talk about products and be active participants in advertising campaigns? We’re not sure how we feel about this idea and we’re curious about your perspective.
SocialMedia.com has raised millions of dollars in financing and says it’s seen excellent results in previous campaigns on Facebook and other social networks. Now it’s going to bring its strategy to Twitter, dedicated microsites and elsewhere around the web. The strategy is essentially to track, highlight and prompt casual conversations online about an advertiser’s product. Do you want to be part of those kinds of conversations?
Social Media’s Nick Gonzalez says the company’s previous campaigns have been found to “increase purchasing intent 6% over standard digital campaigns and in target audiences that went up to 13% over standard digital campaigns.” Those campaigns asked users of things like Facebook applications what they thought about a product, then shared the answers out with respondents’ friend networks on Facebook.
Now the company is going to roll out a service that tracks Twitter mentions of a company, product or keyword. The discovered search results will be filterable, can be limited to a particular group of users, and can then be displayed in a widget or microsite. For an additional fee SocialMedia will purchase ads in popular Twitter clients that prompt users to Tweet about an advertiser. Twitter users don’t get paid for doing so, they just get the opportunity to offer public feedback, perhaps with a common hashtag so all the related tweets can be viewed publicly with ease. We can imagine people going for that. RSS readers can click here to participate in a poll on this topic and view the results.
Other new products being rolled out today include branded embeddable polls and activity stream publishing microsites that will function a little like Twitter but will stand alone on an advertiser’s site.
This doesn’t sound terribly complicated and in fact sounds like it could work quite well. But will you welcome these kinds of conversations into your social media experience? The “your friend is a fan of this product” ads on Facebook are a touch creepy already. Are you ready to see this paradigm proliferate through the work of companies like this?
“I came here to talk about my thoughts, feelings and experiences with friends and a global network of diverse people – and you want me to write about your product?”
