• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, June 17, 2010

That's what Feed Co. President Josh Warner said is happening on the social graph, where the viral nature of brand news seems to be dissipating at faster rates than it used to. Warner, whose company "seeds" branded videos to social users, says that a typical campaign used to have a half life of about "four weeks."

"Now it's a week. Next year, it is going to be several days," he predicted during the morning session of OMMA Social in New York, adding, "It gets harder and harder."

Warner didn't explain the phenomenon, but it could be that users are growing innured by the volume of branded video circulating on the Web. Or it could just be the old Madison Avenue demons of "fragmentation" and "clutter."

Whatever the reasons, Warner, who has worked on campaigns for Activision and Levis, said there might be a new form of channel conflict emerging on social media, and it's one in which so-called "paid" media is beginning to compete - and maybe counteract - "earned media" strategies.

He cites a recent Feed Co. executed for an unnamed marketer utilizing organic, "earned" video distribution. Just as the videos were starting to pick up steam, he said Feed Co. noticed that the same marketer had concurrently been paying people to tweet its message.

"it was such a conflict," Warner recalled. "We were kind of getting drowned out."

He says the problem was worse than simply neutralizing. After working hard to build an authentic relationship with social media users picking up the brand's video content, the paid tweets initiative seemed to rub it in their faces.

"These commercial messages just flooded the network, and we got drowned out. It was hard to reach out to influencers, when they saw it, and realized, 'Hey, people are getting paid for this.'"

Warner isn't necessarily against paid social media strategies. He just believes they have different effects and should be used as part of a strategic plan.

"You get a different result from paid and earned," he said, adding that the ultimate goal of any social media campaign is the same as any good marketing effort, creating "engagement capital."

"You have to earn engagement capital for your brand," he said, implying that it wasn't necessarily something that could be bought.

"The level of branding really, really affects the engagement capital," Warner said, adding that it doesn't necessarily have to be explicit in the video content distributed by marketers. If you do it properly, he said, "they know."

Feed Co.'s Warner