Why social platforms dominate in PR, marketing and sales

Sometimes a marketer or PR (public relations) specialist hesitates to extend his classical marketing and PR methods with their social media couterparts.

When we understand the value of the social media network effect, we would think twice before we reject the idea. Social media enables far reach of many more audience than classical media for a fraction of the costs.

Network effect

Figure 1: Telephone network performance (derived from Wikipedia network effect article, 2008)

When social Web users incrementally collaborate and exchange experience using a specific social platform, interest increases. The useful and informative content attract new users and lead to more engagement from current ones. The increased platform usage leads to more interesting content. The platform will be more attractive and so on.

"A product displays positive network effects when more usage of the product by any user increases the product's value for other users (and sometimes all users)" (Arun Sundararajan, 2006).

This network effect can be illustrated by a telephone network. The increasing number of telephones leads to more value of existing telephones.

Network effect In Action

The "World of Warcraft" (WoW) game is a good example of how the network effect can positively increases players' performance through exchanging information and experiences. New players learn from their peers experience shared in forums, blogs, Wikis and high quality answers and instructional videos.

"The more players participate and interact with WoW's knowledge economy, the more valuable its resources become, and the faster players increase their rate of performance improvement. Said more generally, the more participants--and interactions between those participants--you add to a carefully designed and nurtured environment, the more the rate of performance improvement goes up "(John Hagel III et al., 2009)The figure below presents performance of WOW new players. After the first 150 playing hours, players win on average two million points. After the next 150 hours they can win eight million points, though the next levels are more difficult.

Figure 2: Learning curve of World of Warcraft players (derived from Hagel III et al., 2009)

In subsequent posts, I will present more practical applications of social media to extend (and not replace) the classical marketing and PR methods.

Twitter has been the fastest growing major website in the UK over the last 12 months

According to Hitwise, UK Internet traffic to Twitter, the “micro-blogging” service and social network, has increased 22-fold over the last 12 months.
During May 2009 www.twitter.com ranked as the 38th most visited website in the UK and the fifth most visited social network. Just one year ago, in May 2008, it was the 969th most visited website and 84th most visited social network.
 
According to Joel Comm in his book Twitter Power, the largest age demographic is now 35 to 44 years old.
14 percent of Twitter's visitors are "Stable Career" types.
Another 12 percent are "Young Csmopolitans"- 40-somethings with household incomes of over $250,000 per year.
 
This information is of importamt interest to marketers of professional services and consulting firms. Twitter seems to provide access to high quality network of professionals and decision makers and it is not an option to utilize this outstanding opportunity.

Users Interactions With Social Netwoks Search

Oneupweb has conducted an interesting research on user interaction with search results in social networks.

In page 18 of the research, I found an interesting comment which might be very much relevant to consultancy firms.

"Users spent more time interacting with the search results page on Facebook compared with time engaged with results on YouTube. However, once a YouTube video was clicked, participants continued to interact with the related results on the right of the screen while they waited for the video to load."

The above analysis reveals how Youtube could help in marketing and brand building processes.

To be more specific, when a company uploads videos in several parts which share the same title appended by numbering parts such as part 1 and part 2, Youtube would present several videos related to the same subject which in this particular case, the same brand.

I had personally seen this Youtube behaviour in the past, but never thought that this Youtube bahaviour could unite with user behaviour in the interest of the firm/brand/product being presented in Youtube.

PR (public relations) and Marketing to Social Web

Social networks have made it possible that many people can connect and talk. Some have fun building friendships, while others do business and search prospects.
This web site is to help managers, marketers and sales force understand the potential of marketing and PR (public relations) to social networks and communities.

Through discussion threads that can be moderated by any of the community users, we aim at assessing the opportunities available in social networks and the effectiveness of doing PR and marketing through the social web.
Ultimately we should learn how PR and marketing to the social web could strengthen their classical counterparts.
Please enjoy it.