• by Michael Lazerow , August 28, 2008

What started out in 2003 as simple community-based Web sites and tools for sharing information with friends, social media has grown into a phenomenon of epic proportions with the monumental success of sites such as YouTube, Bebo, Flickr, Digg and a myriad of others.

Earlier this month, ComScore reported that over half a billion people worldwide hang out on social networks. That translates into two-thirds of all Internet users. And half of those, about 250 million people, call Facebook and MySpace home.

As social networks continue to expand their reach and diversify their content, the number of options for delivering innovative advertising to engaged audiences grows exponentially. Further, the opening of social networking sites to outside developers provides media and brands with direct access to millions of valuable consumers. But the question remains: How can advertisers and brand marketers successfully stimulate these potential consumers?

Today, the noise is deafening. There are no less than 500 companies trying to help brand marketers engage with social media -- ad networks, technology providers, monitoring services, and community platforms have all jumped in the pool, but nobody is making a splash. Even the most successful examples of social media marketing, including branded applications and entertaining app-vertisements, have been hard to quantify in terms of measuring their success.

So what is the best way to reach a broad audience within a social network while maximizing engagement? The strategy and creative execution will change for each company -- but the end result should always be to significantly build, enhance and sustain what is best-termed "social brand loyalty."

Traditional brand loyalty has been defined as a consumer's commitment to purchase and repurchase a brand, their word of mouth advocacy and their prolonged engagement with the brand. Similarly, social brand loyalty, a concept in its infant stages of recognition, is best described as the intense adoption of, commitment to and interaction with a brand within a social network. For advertisers and brand marketers, achieving social brand loyalty is marked by their ability to:

• Generate initial use or introduction to a brand.

• Educate consumers to the brand features and benefits.

• Create intense engagement with the brand.

• Extend reach to a broader demographic target.

• Drive a rapid lift in awareness of the brand.

By generating social brand loyalty, many of the concerns advertisers and brand marketers have about advertising within the social media channel can effectively be answered. In addition, generating social brand loyalty is quantifiable, more efficient and highly effective, providing measurable and proven reasons for brand marketers and advertisers to market to social media audiences.

The problem, to date, has been how to create social brand loyalty? In many cases, advertisers and brand marketers have been unable or unwilling to fully understand the social media landscape. And those of us, who have become familiar, regularly struggle to keep up with the constant changes and developments.

To many advertisers and brand marketers, the term social brand loyalty might be new. However, the building blocks of social brand loyalty exposure, engagement and advocacy are familiar and essential to any online or offline advertising camping. Unlike other digital media, impressions or eyeballs are not an end to themselves in social media marketing, but rather a means to an end. And that end is extreme engagement with brands in the social world, or social brand loyalty.

By adapting and modifying these traditional techniques, advertisers and brand marketers like FedEx, Anheuser-Busch, Priceline, New Balance, and Bacardi have begun to understand that generating social brand loyalty does not mean reinventing the conventional advertising model or redefining traditional brand loyalty. Rather, it is the continued use of old techniques combined with the innovative applications that provide fun and engaging branded experiences that can successfully reach the social audience.

The days of unclear goals and parameters for measuring social media advertising are over. We now have a clear objective: to create social brand advocates, eager evangelists of the brand and brand messages, who rapidly recommend the branded application and brand itself. Moving forward, the capacity to generate social brand loyalty will become the mainstream measurement for social media advertising, providing another example of the advertising industry's ability to adapt to changing times.