Social Networking: Personal Experience of the Masses

In my opinion the advertising possibilities of Social Networking websites such as Facebook are unlimited. Let's take a local clothing boutique for example - Victoire in Ottawa Downtown. Victorie specializes in independent Canadian designers and local Ottawa designers. The key customers of the boutique are women 18-25 years old. Now, how do you reach these women locally without spending ton of money (one would assume the ad budget isn't very big in this case)? Well, first of all, Victorie doesn't have an official website but... has a MySpace page (check it out at http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=87473347) . The page's got all the store info you need, a blog you can subscribe to, some pictures plus a bit of a personality expressed in the profile details and added music.

How can you expand the boutique's reach further? Facebook, off course. Undoubtedly, Facebook beats anything else in reaching that 18-25 demo. You can start with creating a Facebook page for the store to establish some interactive presence. Facebook users can become Victorie's fans and whenever they interact with the page, their friends will automatically get the updates in their News Feeds. Seeing friends taking some action with the company adds a personal aspect to Victorie, and the three sentences of the social story can create much more awareness and potentially generate more sales than any other local media vehicle. Taking it even further, Victorie can create an application with the Facebook Platform allowing the target audience to have an even more personal experience with the company. Something like "here is all the clothing and accessories we've got. Now choose your model and dress her the way you want". Or "create your wish list and post it on your profile" or "message your fav items to your friends". Really, sky is the limit. If Victorie wants to get some first-hand opinions from its potential customers, all they've got to do is create a poll.

As you can see REAL brand/product/company interaction is a REAL trend in advertising these days, specially if you want to reach the young and restless. We don't want messages targeted at masses anymore. We want to have a personal experience and we want to decide what that experience is going to be.

Guerilla Marketing: Fun, Scary... Effective!

Guerilla marketing is definately the coolest part of the advertising these days. Having done a little research, I'm amazed how creative advertisers around the world get. I came across a couple of websites that have a lot of cool guerilla marketing and other advertising posted. Check them out:

http://blog.guerrillacomm.com/

http://www.ibelieveinadv.com/

Some guerilla marketing stuff that blew me away:

"Take out a condom and help the fight against AIDS", Brazil.

Done by Escala Comunicacao e Marketing, Brazil. On the World AIDS Day, 500 condoms were put together to form the word "AIDS" in various spots throughout the city. Over 8,000 pedestrians have interacted with the poster by the end of the day. This guerilla marketing effort visually communicated how use of condoms can help to stop the spread of AIDS. I think it's brilliantly simple and simply brilliant.

"Prejudice is one of the worst side-effects", Denmark.

This guerilla marketing effort from Denmark is a literal take on the attitudes towards HIV positive individuals. On the World AIDS Day, a number of individuals walked around in balloons wearing a t-shirt with the campaign slogan "Prejudice is one of the worst side-effects".

I came across several guerilla marketing efforts where the placement of the ad was cruicial to communicating the message. See for yourself!

"Save the paper, save the planet", WWF. Watch South America turning from green to black as more and more paper towels are used.

"Noodleslurper", Mondo Pasta, Germany. "Huge stickers of faces turned ships into permanent pasta slurpers".

Wolf hot sauce, Thailand. These visuals placed on hand dryers in washrooms clearly comunicated how hot this Wolf stuff really is.

Some other really cool stuff:

"Friends of The Earth", Hong Kong. In this poster, polluted air speaks for itself. The poster is blank with a clear sticky coating over the headline and the visual. Over time, dust and dirt stick to the poster revealing the headline "Polluted air pollutes" and the visual of lungs.

"Take your kids for a check-up of their jaws and teeth before it's too late", custom pacifiers marketing local orthodontist in Germany. Scary stuff!!

"1 in 5", Canadian Mental Health Association, Alberta (by MacLaren McCann Calgary). In order to comunicate that mental illnesses affect 1 in 5 people, numerous "1 in 5" scratch off tickets were distributed in office buildings, malls, food courts etc for people to discover, scratch & learn.

Blog It Away and... Get Paid!

Welcome to my blog, guys!

And what's a better way to start off a blog than to talk about blogging? Only to talk about blogging and its use in advertising today! So here we go.

I came across an article by a Washington Post author, Sara Kehaulani Goo, called "Product Reviews And Links Turn Pages Into Profit" (check it out at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/10/AR2007011002405.html). As it turns out, online bloggers can and do make money and advertisers are willing to pay them!

According to the author of the article, during the past several years a number of firms which solely purpose is to connect bloggers with advertisers have appeared. One of these companies, Chitika, pays people who feature images of various products on their blogs. Bloggers can choose what products they want to be displayed on their blogs and are in turn paid for each click on that image. The categories of these products range from consumer electronics to food and beauty items.

Another interesting fact that I’ve learnt is that apparently, according to David L. Sirfy, chief executive of Technorati company, there are several hundred bloggers for whom blogging is a full-time job. For around 10,000 bloggers it’s their secondary source of income.

There are also a number of firms that help bloggers and companies seeking to buy online reviews of their products to connect. One of those firms, ReviewMe.com, asks bloggers to disclose that they were paid for the review. However, not all advertisers leave satisfied since the reviews are not always positive.

This article have shown me that the world of online advertising is constantly growing and expanding. New options and opportunities to reach the target audiences occur, and it’s extremely important for us, advertisers, to stay on top of them.

Stay tuned! I'll discuss Guerilla Advertising in my next post. Until then... have a good one!