Social networking clampdowns and the impact on marketers
With the inception of web 2.0, a lot of marketers geared up for a whole new way of marketing. The audience was, after all, sitting there and identifying their interests through groups they would join. Savvy marketers had to make a few minor adjustments and they could access a pre-identified target market.
On MySpace, for instance, a number of “add a friend” automated programs appeared so that a group of people could be identified as having an interest in your product and messages sent out to all the thousands of friends that the automated program added to your MySpace profile.
This was about as close to perfect as could be for marketers. After all, the money is in the list.
Facebook had similar vulnerabilities that allowed people to seek out friends, to use the term loosely, based on their identified interests.
On Squidoo, the iframe tag that was part of the html function of the text module allowed marketers to include links and marketing techniques that pulled their message into the Squidoo world.
These web 2.0 sites tightened up their security, adding in features that required human intervention. Squidoo simply deleted the iframe capability.
The clampdowns have had a twofold impact. One is that the social networking sites’ efforts to block marketers from essentially spamming users has endeared these sites to people who appreciate the protection offered by the social networks. The clampdown is typically viewed by users as a pro-user effort.
This means that marketers, even the good white hat ones, who might have used the social networking sites as places for easy targeting of a new market segment, have the fallout of being viewed as annoying.
While this was not the intention, all marketers fall into the “them” aspect of the we-them dyad created when the social networks set up ways to protect their users.
A second factor is that, as Google recently noted, “social-networking inventory is not monetizing as well as expected.”
Google made a $900 million ad deal with MySpace a year and half ago. It backfired, to be blunt about it. Users go to the social networks to get away from the old ad-driven world. Already jaundiced by the experience of being added as friends and deluged with unwanted ads, users of social networks seem to reject ads in general. They go to these social sites to escape from the pressures of commerce.
