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"S@les are virtual, LOL for Black Friday retailers" says the headline of a New York Post story which makes it known that the Twitter feed Cheaptweet -- one among many aggregating holiday deals -- is spitting out 800 deals per hour. And then there are all the individual retailers using the social Web to get the word out about their holiday promos: Toys 'R' Us, Target, Amazon -- they're all there, tweeting and Facebook-ing their way to profit.
When you think about it, this shiny, new, social media Black Friday is JetBlue's "All You Can Jet" promo writ large. As you might recall, that promotion used social media channels -- I believe exclusively -- to advertise a deal it was offering last fall in which one cheap ticket bought unlimited flights on the service for an entire month. It sold out early, and didn't give a dime to the newspapers and TV stations that normally would have gotten the word out about the campaign, via paid advertising.
This is great news, if you're an advertiser. But for media companies, I predict a series of increasingly Black Fridays. For now, most retailers wouldn't have the nerve to cut out a lot of their advertising budget, but that won't last. As consumers, we are slowly being trained to look to social media for real-time information about promotions. You knew this already, because you do it, as I do. In case there was any question about it, Razorfish released a study earlier this month that said 44% of people who follow brands on Twitter do so because they want exclusive deals, while 37% of MySpace and Facebook brand fans "fanned" advertiser pages for the same reason. Ha! And you thought social media was a dialogue! (Disclosure: I've been known to do editing for Razorfish, but had no involvement in that report.)
So, imagine you're a smart marketer, and you begin to notice how powerful it is to have your promotional messages spreading through social networks. Then you calculate the ROI of the sales that come via customers who learned about a certain promotional event via social networks vs. those who learned about it via a TV campaign or a newspaper circular. Then you look at how the number of people who subscribe to your social media distribution channels is growing, and how that's probably destined to make the ROI you achieve through social networks even better. It doesn't take a rocket scientist, or even a particularly astute analytics specialist, to tell you it's time to reexamine how much you're spending in paid media.
A year from now, whether the recession is behind us or not, paid media is going to be a lot less important to retailers than it has been. And so on, and so on, for many Black Fridays to come. On that note, depressing as this column may be to some of you, Happy Black Friday!
(For the record, I don't shop on the day after Thanksgiving. I got out of the game once the original Filene's Basement closed down in Boston. Just ain't the same.)
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Another area in which Social Media (as well as texting, phoning, emailing, and even plain old face-to-face conversations) surely is growing and providing competition for traditional media advertising is in shaping brands (both positively and negatively). Media adverstising isn't going away, but the monopoly on the messaging is gone forever. The "airwaves" have expanded exponentially with the Internet and ehanced phone communications and the barriers to producing the messages are being reduced everyday as new computers and new cellphones (with cameras and keyboards) go into more consumers' hands.
While that is certainly a useful revenue strategy, and media companies will suffer for being bypassed in these relationships, social media + new customer acquisition is a much more complex issue. I am not convinced, at least yet, that retailers can rely on word-of-digital-mouth exclusively to get their brand and offers in front of new potential customers.
On a related note, I find it pretty funny (if not outright cynical) that consumers are being trained to now call today "Black Friday".
However, marketers can pull the middle of the bell curve into the conversation by making it both valuable and practical to participate. Deals are the valuable half. Now just provide your audience with a way to filter and better connect, and social media becomes the ultimate direct marketing, promo and brand-building tool.
Brands and advertisers have made every medium in history available to a broad audience. Not so with social media... YET. But when brands finally learn to help frame and facilitate the conversation instead of bolting onto current behavior, SM will mainstream -- which will be great for media consumers and marketers alike.
I apologize to sound harsh but too few people are using social media. If Facebook had 92 million unique vistors in August (including international) then they only have maybe 1 in 6 or 7 Americans going on the site all with their attentions focused all over the place. Twitter is even more scattered. I have 4 accounts. You can buy friends, followers, fans, and buzz by the 1,000 from vendors who specialize in social media fraud!
I have a finance degree and a view from the CFO seat. I will use social media to listen and engage but not to advertise aside from some cute promo's here and there. Traditional Media is safe from social media...but it isn't safe from a fragmented marketplace that is losing money from ad supported business models vs selling content! Cheers.
Advertising is quickly shifting to open platforms that users control, as opposed to the old way where media companies and businesses controlled a relatively small number of advertising vehicles priced to reflect their high demand and limited availability.
And the ROI argument in your second to last paragraph gets a bit squishy. (e.g., "...and how that's probably destined...")
Yes the use of social media will grow, and promotions will command a lot of SM attention. But paid media won't be damaged "pretty severely"...whatever that means.
But imagine if you could combine the strengths of both? You could harness the power of social relationships and personal recommendations, and at the same time target the right group of potential customers and maximize the reach of your brand message beyond social networks. Sounds great, right? That's why at socialmedia.com we are so excited to be creating social ads for our clients. Someday, all ads will be social!