Daily Archives: January 6, 2009

Interesting article in Clickz, that says:

creating campaigns for social platforms is hard work that frequently produces marginal results, and upbeat case studies are few and far between.

“Not many marketers have really cracked the code,” said Amy Auerbach, SVP and director of digital at Initiative. “It’s such a utility for Web users.”

Google is one firm whose efforts on social networking sites are “not monetizing as well as expected,” according to previous CFO George Reyes.

Reyes and co-founder Larry Page told investors back in January that the firm has done “lots of experimenting” with social network advertising. Google represents ads on MySpace, its own Orkut service, and numerous other properties.

“We have a huge amount of social networking inventory,” said Page. “It varies quite a bit how well we monetize, based on a number of factors, some of which we understand, some of which we don’t.”

But these breakaway hits are by and large exceptions to the rule. And the rule is this: Marketers can’t easily build awareness on social media sites — not yet anyway.

“Social media is a good data mining tool for sure,” said Auerbach. “Beyond that, in terms of marketing to people while they’re at social media destinations, it’s not as good as we’d hoped.”

It’s true, that when I am interacting socially on Facebook or Orkut with my friends I really don’t want to click on ads. And I also don’t like becoming fans of most brands.