• by Margaret A. Starvish , August 2, 2007

Connecting with social networkers can be easy-peasy or a PR nightmare

Meet WomanPower. She's a member of the niche social networking site BlackPlanet.com. According to her profile, she's a 37-year-old Cancer from North Carolina.

She's also one of the newest recruits to the Warner Bros. advertising force.

On a Monday afternoon this spring, WomanPower linked to a story about the 30th anniversary of the groundbreaking miniseries "Roots" in the news section of the site, and posted the question, "Should we make our children watch the "Roots" DVD?"

By Tuesday morning she had more than 200 responses, including several with in-depth arguments in the affirmative. Around the same time, Peter Bassett, the senior vice president of the client solutions group at BlackPlanet's publisher, Community Connect, was in talks with an agency about how to market the "Roots" DVD, which Warner Bros was about to reissue. Ultimately, Bassett asked WomanPower if she'd be willing to sponsor a "Roots" group on BlackPlanet.com.

She agreed to do so - for free. Within three weeks, the group had signed up 6,756 members and garnered 66 forum topics, 548 posts, 202 group photos and a 1.55 click-through rate on ad units.

But not all consumer-generated efforts on social networking sites play out so smoothly. Consider a contest by Malibu Caribbean Rum on YouTube last spring. It created a public relations nightmare for the company after some of the entrants claimed the contest was rigged. Malibu denied the allegations, but couldn't contain the press coverage of the uproar, which included a story in The New York Times.

Part of the problem seems to be that many companies have only a superficial understanding of the dynamics of social networking sites. "Marketers have had a very, very challenging time trying to figure out how to be relevant in consumer-generated or consumer-connected environments," says Timothy Hanlon, senior vice president at Denuo, the media futures practice of Publicis Groupe. One obvious reason: the executives who plan media campaigns aren't themselves users of social networking sites. "It's almost like having a 40-year-old guy going into a bar populated by 20-year-olds - they're trying to be something they're not," says Hanlon.

Another factor is that some agencies don't put enough thought into these initiatives. Instead, some still view them as offshoots of larger TV campaigns - a tactical error, says Hanlon. Advertising on social networking sites should be seen as "something living or breathing that needs to be managed, measured, optimized and renewed."

"Agencies need a long-term social networking strategy," agrees Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep Focus, the advertising agency behind several high-profile social networking campaigns for movies and other entertainment on MySpace.

Brands also must learn to give up some control, says Sarah Fay, president of Isobar us. "We believe the brands that will win will be the brands about which consumers tell each other the best stories" says Fay.

One of those brands that's letting the consumer in is Coca-Cola, which recently ran a competition in Second Life in which residents and the public were invited to design an online "Virtual Thirst" vending machine. "We're all about connectivity," says Michael Donnelly, director of worldwide interactive marketing at Coca-Cola.

Part of the effort includes a video blog created by Donnelly in response to criticisms of the contest posted throughout the blogosphere, and a presence at a YouTube gathering held in July, in New York City's Washington Square Park, at which the company handed out free bottles of soda.

In some circumstances, calling upon users to submit clips isn't productive. A recent Adidas effort, for example, that asked people to create and upload video to MySpace didn't fare well in terms of submission numbers or overall quality. "Not great watching," is how Fay describes the results.

Some companies are deploying campaigns on social networking sites that don't rely on individual users to create material. George Consagra, vice president of marketing for the social networking site Bebo, says marketing on social networking sites relies on trying to "build a community within a community."

Bebo tends to eschew consumer-generated content in favor of contests, skins and other content that's rolled out to users - a strategy used in campaigns for Spider-Man 3, the television program "Friday Night Lights" and Skittles. The skins created for the Skittles campaign were particularly popular, with tens of thousands of users adding them to their profiles, generating multiple millions of page views.

Colleen DeCourcy, chief experience officer of advertising agency JWT, is likewise critical of efforts that rely on consumers to create ads. She says the future of advertising lies in managing what she calls the "grid" of touchpoints that exist on the Internet. She adds that agencies would do well to hire "digital anthropologists" who are skilled at understanding that grid and working within it.

"Consumer-generated content, as the litmus test for success in online advertising material, is on the way out," she says.

Of course, not everyone agrees. Kevin Nalty, a marketing executive at a pharmaceutical firm and amateur filmmaker whose Punk'd-style YouTube clips led to a deal with Mentos and a seat on the creative advisory board of xlntads (a consumer-generated advertising platform), says user-created ads aren't going anywhere for a while. "It has taken big agencies a decade to build up expertise around page search," he says. Following this logic, there should be a market for consumer-generated advertising for at least the next five to 10 years, he adds.