A new company’s popped up - Super Expansion - who apparently are “dedicated to finding the most aggressive, underground ways of promotion via online guerilla marketing”, hat tip to Entrepreneur’s Journey. They seem to have three businesses. The first is using MySpace bulletins to promote sites, the second is an automated ad-poster for Craigslist and the third is a service to seed ads on bulletin boards.
The MySpace one is probably the most interesting, they say:
We’ve created a network of account holders who, between them have thousands and millions of friends. By having these multiple account holders place your bulletin it looks like genuine, organic buzz. Whether you’re a brand looking to drive traffic to a jump site, or a band establishing a following, our bulletin program is a way to spread authentic buzz to a large group of people.
I’ve suddenly realised why random normal people ask to be my MySpace friend. It’s so I can be collated and sold as a bulk campaign. I’m sure that is does alright for awareness, but only in the same way I could name you drugs like Xanax, Cialis, Voixx and Ambien. In other words I know they exist but have no need for them and certainly wouldn’t buy them a bulletin from someone who I don’t really know.
The interesting thing about MySpace is that there are some people who have very high levels of trust with their friends. They tend to be ’supernodes’, people who have well-regarded links with lots of individuals that cross friendship groups and individual locations. It would be a much more sensible and valuable business for ‘Super Expansion’
if they worked with their clients to explain their products and services to supernodes and get them to buy in to (and promote) these products. But I guess that would be a bit harder than sending our a load of spam bulletins, wouldn’t it?
One of the lovely things about Facebook has been its less intensive advertising. There’s been some banners but it’s mostly been more promotions based marketing where features (like Holiday Centre) have been sponsored or Groups that allow you to opt-in to connect to some activity (like the new JT film Alpha Dog).
Facebook has grown as a student network. Up until a few months ago you could only get on if you had a .ac.uk or .edu email address. This meant they were pretty much ignored by mainstream-media as no-one could really get on and have a look. However during this time they’ve signed-up millions of users and have an amazingly high penetration into the student market - all of which seem to love the service.
This more grass-roots approached allows them to embark on a micro-marketing opportunities. Users can buy ‘flyers’ for $5 which get you 10,000 impressions if you’re a student and 2,500 impressions if you’re not. These allow individual campuses to be targeted giving some interesting commercial opportunities to arise.
Trendcatching’s pointed out one company that’s taken advantage of these - Boso. Boso is an “online marketplace where students can trade their second-hand stuff with other students, quickly and easily.” They use flyers to remark on current news and entertainment stories to provoke reasons for students to sample their site. It’s a classic piece of brand building that gives the site a personality and encourage trial in a crowded marketplace.
Disappointingly though it seems that since Friday Facebook has bit the bullet and signed up to a number of ad-networks generating banners on every page. Disappointingly they’re not particularly targeted and have included those seemingly social-network standard-issue ones for smilies. Something that has created a Facebook group dedicated to “Get those fucking talking smileys off facebook!!” It will be interesting to see if this changes over the coming weeks and months.
E4’s new youth show Skins had a great audience for its first episode - 1.6m, much of which must have been driven by an excellent youth marketing campaign by Naked and Holler. The show’s had a dual-position with sites at e4.com/skins and MySpace. The E4 site’s allowed visitors to re-design the logo, one of which they re-brand the site with every week, enter compeititons and see mini web-only episodes that site alongside the broadcast show.
As well as showing the episodes, the MySpace site acts as a mini-hub pushing vistors to the profile pages of all the characters. Vistors can then friend either individual characters or the show as a whole. It’s interesting to see the interaction from real people in the comments on the characters pages. There’s a mix of remarks to the actors and to the persona’s of the characters.
With the characters profiles appearing alongside visitors’ real-world friends it shows how with the right product you can integrate branded activity into consumer’s own social networks.
What’s a shame is that the producers haven’t really seen the activity through post-launch. The profiles have been beautifully designed and really reflect the characters’ personalities, they include good ‘about me’ info and they even include video and audio like a real MySpace user. What they haven’t done though, is update the characters blogs. It would be great to hear each character’s own take on the episodes that have just aired and the comments from visitors would have been a great read too. It could of also gone a step further with characters interacting on each other’s MySpace pages.
The Skins campaign is easily the best execution so far of a big brand trying to replicate MySpace users activity, but it will be great to see who goes the whole hog.
