I had recently posted about the impact of UGC(user generated content) in travel and the rising power of user-driven marketing. It seems this is an interesting trend that is gaining ground. Myspace, the social networking site, conducted a study called neverendingfriending and there are some interesting facts from this study. Forbes has carried an article on the same which mentions some of the highlights of the study which include:
- When a MySpace user talks, her friends listen.
- ..in addition to the 1.8 million MySpace users who said they plan to buy a new Electronic Arts game after seeing the company’s ad campaign on MySpace (at a cost of $1.19 per user), 4.5 million more — people who saw the brand’s profile or heard about the product from a friend, but didn’t see the ads — said they’d buy it, too.
- MySpace calls that kind of word-of-mouth spreading of an online ad campaign the “momentum effect,” and says its ability to calculate the chatty effect is the best thing to happen to social network marketing since, well, clicks.
Some key questions that came to mind were:
- User Initiated Discussions(UIDs) in social networking sites drive brand awareness and conversions. How will one monetize this impact as this has an effect beyond CPT and CPC?
- For advertisers' and social networking sites, it is more than just getting more dollars but may be is there a need for a new form of "giving back" to the community that needs to be adopted by brands?
- Context-driven conversations(CDCs) have to become accountable and transparent. Is there a need for a new kind of tracking that needs to evolve? It has to move beyond white papers and studies in my opinion for ad dollars to move here.