Social networks and mobile apps are as hot as a Las Vegas sidewalk any day in August. Putting the two together will be the next major marketing opportunity for advertisers, at least for those that understand how to engage with social communities without being seen as gate crashers.
Social media is e-mail 2.0
Tens of millions of people are using social networks to communicate instead of e-mail because social communities are simple, ubiquitous, enable users to interact in real-time and provide for a richer multimedia experience. Because of that, social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Yammer and others are now in the process of creating “E-mail 2.0.”
It’s a new form of communication; not quite e-mail, more lightweight and more real time, often with little bit of a publishing flavor to it,” says Paul Buchheit, founder of FriendFeed, and the creator and lead developer of GMail, when he was at Google. FriendFeed lets users share content from Twitter and Flickr and converse by text in real time.
Social communities and advertisers need each other
Social networks don’t make nearly as much money as their size would suggest. On one hand, want to monetize their audiences. Advertisers, meanwhile, want to be where their customers are, which will require them to find ways to participate in, rather than get in the way, of the social network experience. That will take trial and error but the gist is that advertisers will need to:
- Work more closely with social networks.
- Adopt a more authentic tone in advertising
- Use advertising to add value
Facebook connects
According to Nielsen, Facebook–the world’s most popular social network with175 million users–is visited monthly by 3 in every 10 people online across the nine global markets in which Nielsen tracks social networking use.
In 2006, Facebook introduced the first version of the Facebook API, enabling users to share their information with the third-party Web sites and apps and then in 2007, the company launched Facebook Platform, which allowed third-party developers to build rich apps within Facebook. The third step occurred over the weekend, when Facebook released Facebook Connect for iPhone.With the massive acceptance of the iPhone in 2008, Facebook sees a huge opportunity in making it easier for iPhone and iPod touch developers to plug into Facebook make their apps more social.
iPhone and iPod touch owners users can log in to Facebook from within their apps to find their friends and share what they do in their apps on Facebook. Now, iPhone apps can do what Facebook Connect sites and Facebook Platform apps already do such as access profiles and share information on Facebook, publish using Feed forms, ask users for extended permissions so they can still interact with their data when they’re offline.
So far, the main feature app developers have focused on is to enable users to share account (log in to one account and access the other), play games and post reviews, scores and post their personal activities on Facebook.
Already, several developers have released apps that integrate with Facebook Connect including:
- Limbo, Limbo–Link accounts and post to Facebook (Free)
- SGN, Agency Wars–Location-enabled, compete against friends (four versions, free to $20.00) and iBowl–Share scores and compete (Free)
- Say Eight, Binary Game–Compete against friends ($1.99)
- Playfish, Who Has the Biggest Brain?–Play and compare scores ($4.99)
- Zynga, Live Poker–Connect from Facebook (Free)
- Flixster, Movies–Rate movies and share ratings (Free)
- Citizen Sports, Sportacular (Free)
- Tapulous, Tap Tap Revenge 2–Post scores (Free)
- Pelago, Whrrl 2.0–Location-enabled, share events as they happen (Free)
- Urbanspoon, Urbanspoon–Share restaurant reviews (Free)
Notice how many of these apps are free (ad-supported)?
Combine social media, mobility and a new ways to engage consumers
Dockers San Francisco is onto something with its newly introduced (also last weekend) interactive, “shakable” ad for the iPhone/iPod touch, which will run on SGN’s iBasketball and iBowl and i.TV’s i.TV.
Real soon, we’ll see more community and multi-player apps such as SGN iBowl, with Docker-like ads embedded into them, that connect mobile users with each other and with their friends on a Web of social media sites. That’s one way advertisers can work more closely with social networks and add value to the experience.
Social networks, mobility and marketing. It’s what’s happening, baby.
