jmarbach.com

Courtesy of jhf of Flickr.com and Creative Commons

Time magazine recognizes Mark Zuckerberg as person of the year, Facebook adds its 550 millionth member, Facebook becomes the most active web messaging service, Twitter is valued at $4 billion, Groupon turns down $6 billion, and More than 50% of videos on YouTube have been rated or include comments from the community. I could ramble on all day about these shocking statistics that are becoming seemingly irrelevant. Relevance is instead being shifted to what we ourselves and our  network of friends find interesting.

We’ve reached the tipping point in 2010, and now we are seeing the explosive growth from the adoption of social sites by people of all ages and interests. Daily use of social sites to share media among our network of friends has reached critical mass. Virtually every business has been reinvented in the context of the social web. Take Groupon for example, they are powering the local deals of small business’s that was once dominated by coupon books. Tumblr has turned the traditional journal into a creative collection of digital media, which is manifested by the inspiration drawn from users with like-minded interests.  Flickr users have now amassed enough geo-located photos so that we can find a point of interest in Google maps, and see photos from the exact location. But there’s more, the social web has moved extensively into our professional lives. Understanding the distinction between personal and professional is of utmost importance to maintaining an online identity in good standing. Yammer helps address this problem with an enterprise level solution that people actually want to use; several multi-national corporations are encouraging employees to collaborate online using private company networks.

So, the question lingers: What’s next? How will I be able to own my future in this virtual world? My opinion on the answer to those questions is to find the right balance between offline and online. We are going to be carrying mobile devices with us everywhere now, therefore staying connected is not the issue. Instead the issue will be: what should we be connected with, and how relevant is it to our lives? Meetup.com does an excellent job of directing traffic at the intersection of offline and online media. I encourage you to start with their advice:

Do something • Learn something • Share something • Change something

In the past year, Facebook has been successful in doubling the millions of daily impressions that their U.S. users generate. Facebook has asserted itself as a dominating force in display advertising, now delivering 25% of the total U.S. display impressions. The closest competing firm is the network of Yahoo sites, with a 12% share that has been on the decline.

Whether or not Facebook’s impressions are desirable or not is another question, but Facebook certainly has more targeted impressions to sell than anyone else. As Facebook continues to practice its mission, “Give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.”, users are becoming more engaged in the ads that they interact with on the site. This will continue to create a more relevant user experience for their users, and provide more targeted advertising opportunities. Advertisers who have not already launched campaigns on the Facebook advertising platform should become familiar with it as soon as possible. Facebook is serving a significant chunk of the pie to millions of internet users, and with their accelerating growth, it’s not far off to say that they can soon control display advertising similar to how Google dominates search ads (78%).

For the start of the upcoming 2010 holiday season, several national brand advertisers have launched their marketing campaigns on social sites. Brand advertisers are finding social sites to be the best platform for their holiday campaigns because they can acquire customers and raise awareness for a charitable cause in a single transaction. For example, Gap launched a campaign last week that asks users to “Like” their ad. When a users clicks “Like” on the ad, Gap donates $1 to a charity, and the users receives a 30% off coupon. The national brand advertisers are locked into more deals on social sites this year, especially considering that the purchases of holiday shoppers are likely to be influenced by social media.

More statistics on this data set can be found in the comScore report.

Just over two weeks ago, I ordered a new pair of Sperry Top-Siders from ShoeBuy.com. Firstly, if you need to buy shoes online, there is a high chance that they will have the pair you are looking for at a discounted rate if you search for their monthly coupon codes. Also, their distribution is setup great (for those that live in the NYC area anyway) because orders are delivered within 3-4 business days.

Now back on subject- I tweeted out a thank you to @ShoeBuy for my happy customer experience and noted that their shipping is fast. Within a couple hours, I received an @ reply back from their brand monitoring employees on Twitter, saying something similar to “thanks for the compliment, we are glad you chose ShoeBuy.com”. The next day I received another @ reply from another rep at ShoeBuy, this time it was to notify me that I had won the “ShoeBuy.com Tweet of the Day”. This simple tweet about my positive customer experience resulted in a free $25 gift card from ShoeBuy by winning the tweet of the day. Props to ShoeBuy and their employees doing brand monitoring with social media. Great work, the Sperry’s fit great!

Now that I have digested the wealth of information offered to me while attending the Affiliate Summit East in New York City, one particular video mentioned by keynote speaker Peter Shankman has stood out; the mention of Stride Chewing Gum’s viral marketing initiative. Large corporations pay millions to develop marketing campaigns that they hope will go viral, for the sole intention of making a particular piece of media go viral (with their brand name splattered across the entire campaign).  Often the yield on the initiatives launched by most large corporations is not nearly equal to the cost of promoting the campaign.

Stride took a different approach to making their marketing campaign go viral. Peter Shankman said, “You can make something viral, but you can make something good.” That’s exactly what Stride did, instead of focusing on making the actual content go viral, they focused on producing really unique and interesting video content. Especially today, us humans love to share great things we find online; the people working for Stride knew this. So, Stride searched for a unique and inspirational video channel on YoutTube, figuring that YouTube is one of the most common launching platform for viral content. The result was choosing Matt Harding to travel, film, produce, and most importantly dance, all around the world with all types of people. Matt was chosen for his previous dancing video, and took the offer up from Stride, who allowed him to fulfill his dancing potential all around the world.

The production cost to Stride was minimal, simply covering all of Matt’s expenses while filming. The entire process took 14 months, from filming to publshing. Nearly 14 months later, the video has accumulated 23,000,000 views. Notice that Stride only reserved a small portion of advertising in the final seconds of the video, this was key to maintaining “good” content. In short, this viral video practically turned Stride into a popular gum choice for people across the globe very shortly.

If you haven’t already seen Matt dancing in “Where the Hell is Matt (2008)”, then I highly suggest you check it out. The movie is incredible, simply one of the best videos I have ever seen on the web-

This post was inspired by Adam Singer’s post named “What If?“.

To everyone who uses Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Digg, Flickr, and/or other social websites: What do you do you use these tools for?

I use social media…?

For innovation.

For social causes.

For collaboration.

For transparency.

For feedback.

For education.

For connecting.

For pursuing your passion.

For simplicity.

For brand-equity.

For talking with your customers.

For sharing.

For marketing.

For finding a job.

For better business.

For curiosity.

For relationships.

For knowledge.

For news.

For fun.

For making things happen.

For achieving your dreams.

Embrace these early years of social media for future success and prosperity.

If you have ideas on other uses for social media, feel free to leave a comment.

Across the web there are countless platforms that enable “paid” media. In other words, you pay for the exposure of a brand/product that you want to be promoted. The problem is that it is harder to achieve earned-media, due to authentic time and effort, but the rewards are much greater if executed right. Earning your media has become a more popular marketing strategy for brands because it’s very cost effective compared to paid media. Recent innovations such as Twitter, Facebook, and other social media properties give a stronger leverage point for brands to earn their media.

When I read marketing news sites, I usually see something like “Advertising Revenue Predicted To Decline”. Yes, this is correct. Meanwhile, I continually see headlines such as “Social Media Advertising Revenue Increases Amid Recession”. Advertising agencies face the challenge of switching from traditional paid media, to “earned” media. So, with the marketing industry flipped upside down, only handful of agencies have been able to make money with this new marketing mentality. One of which is Crispin Porter + Bogusky, they were the master minds behind Burger King’s “Whopper Sacrifice” Facebook un-friending campaign.

Now, all of that is great for major advertising agencies and marketing executives to know, but how can that trickle down into affiliate marketing? If the appropriate social media/crowd-sourcing tools are used, a long term affiliate campaign can be successful with earned-media. Just take a look at already successful earned-media campaigns, and build your own from their. Just be aware that a lot of the time earned-media is involved with offline marketing strategies, so campaigns with strictly online actions would work most efficiently. Get started now with an earned-media affiliate campaign, performance pays!