“I hate my job. But I love the tropical flavor Skittles they stock in the vending machine so it balances out.”
Welcome to the world of “tweets”,short messages that users post online at Twitter.com.
The mundane slice of office life serves as ad-vertising on the Skittles corporate page under the heading, “chatter.”
Skittles, the colorful candy brand owned by Virginia-based Mars Inc., transformed its home page into an online portal featuring a live Twitter feed alongside Facebook, Flickr and YouTube content early this month.
It eliminated corporate text and press releases in favor of what its consumers posted on the Internet, which it links to.
The company is on the forefront of using social networking sites as avenues for advertising. Many local ad agencies are looking to these Internet portals, which are beginning to attract a range of ages and demographics, as less expensive ways to reach people.
“From a marketing standpoint, it’s a matter of looking at these little kinds of packs of people who you’re trying to influence. If you can influence the right one, you can have an instantaneous hit across that pack,” said Dan Olson, managing partner at Young & Rubicam Brands Southern California in Irvine. “That’s the power of marketing. But I don’t think we even know how to do that yet (on social networking sites).”
Breaching social networking is not without its pitfalls.
Two days into the campaign, Skittles was forced to stop its social media experiment after users deluged the site with inane and often profane tweets.
The site, or advertising experiment, now is back up.
Doing this kind of damage control is somewhat common for Internet advertisers.
“It’s more of managing their online reputation,that might be blogs or that might be comments on industry sites, even a Twitter feed,” said Ryan Rieches, chief executive at Irvine-based RiechesBaird.
Levels of Success
The industry has seen several companies try their hands at integrating social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter into their marketing campaigns to varying levels of success.
“Success is gauged by knowing what the component is going to do for your client’s business,” said Jim Harrington, president of O’Leary & Partners in Newport Beach. “A lot of companies use this social networking tactic with no real goal in mind beyond generating a little awareness.”
Social media and networking sites have shifted some consumer Internet usage from entertainment to communication, according to San Francisco-based Netpop Research LLC, a marketing research firm. According to Netpop, 105 million Americans use social media sites, spurring a 93% increase in social networking since 2006.
Networking and blogging sites account for almost 10% of online activity in terms of time, according to Nielsen Co.
How does that translate into ad dollars?
“Social networking advertising is still hit or miss within (the industry),” Olson said.
But it is expected to grow.
Advertising in social networking sites has already increased significantly, with revenue up 148% in 2007, increasing to $685 million in 2007 from $276 million in 2006, according to the latest numbers available from trade publication Advertising Age.
But many companies still are wary of diving into the medium after watching the shaky successes of early adopters.
Miami-based Burger King Holdings Inc. created an application for Facebook called “Whopper Sacrifice” last year that promised users who deleted 10 friends from their Facebook account a free Whopper. Deleted friends would receive messages that said their friendship was less valuable than a whopper. The campaign was termed a success by the number of Whoppers issued and a surge in traffic at the restaurant
But the campaign created controversy and a little bit of backlash within the social networking circles about its morality.
“After the Burger King thing, a lot of companies are now gun-shy when it comes to social networking. The recession isn’t helping either,” said Sean Hardwick, senior vice president at the Irvine office of DraftFCB.
Many within the advertising industry see Facebook and other sites as ways to create a dialogue with consumers. But many have been unable to find the key to success.
Some Orange County restaurants chains have started to use Facebook, including Newport Beach-based Ruby Restaurant Group; Wienerschnitzel, part of Newport Beach-based Galardi Group Inc.; and Lake Forest-based Del Taco LLC, part of Nashville, Tenn.-based Sagittarius Brands Inc.
Ruby’s Chief Executive Doug Cavanaugh calls the social networking scene new territory for companies.
“We don’t know if this is going to work,” he said.
Staying Away
Certain industries are staying away from it all together.
Healthcare ad shop Pacific Communi-cations, part of Irvine-based drug maker Allergan Inc., is keeping its distance from anything related to social networking. Healthcare ad agencies have problems with it because many of their clients are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, which restricts direct-to-consumer marketing and also pays attention to consumer complaints,even on Twitter.
“Our products are primarily FDA-regulated and it becomes very difficult for pharmaceutical companies to manage that kind of activity because the liability issues are quite unclear,” said Ryan Abbate, president of Costa Mesa-based Pacific Communications.
The big issue is if anybody comes forward with a side effect for a specific product, even if it’s in the form of Internet activity, the manufacturer is required to keep track of and report that to the FDA, Abbate said.
Most companies,which don’t face that regulatory obstacle,see social media as a relatively inexpensive marketing tool. But they are unsure of how to use it or whether it is actually driving traffic or sales.
“We have several Facebook profiles for our clients and they accomplish a part in the overall strategy for our brand,” Harrington of O’Leary & Partners said. “A better way to evaluate success of a social networking campaign is to look at the entire brand strategy.”
In tough economic times, just increasing brand awareness isn’t enough for companies, which are looking for definitive returns on investments.
“I don’t think you can isolate it out and say it was a success or failure, because there is no quantifiable metric. It’s not like you have something to compare it to, so you have to use your own metrics,” Harrington said.
Tracking the success of presence on new “it” site Twitter may prove even harder.
Twitter, a free social messaging Web site for staying connected in real-time, limits users to writing 140 characters,making marketing speak difficult to condense. Also the proliferation of people twittering constantly keeps each message on the screen for a short time, although topics are searchable in archived “conversations.”
“(Twitter) is growing, but it doesn’t have a huge penetration yet, like some of the other ones,” Harrington of O’Leary & Partners said. “But it’s going to become a major force of communication in the next few years.”
Older Audience
Many of the social networking sites were originally geared for younger audiences, but the sites are appealing to more than just kids and young adults these days, according to Nielsen Co.
Olson said that Twitter and Facebook are starting to appeal to older people as the social networking groups delve into politics and book clubs instead of primarily gossip and music.
Businesses are just beginning to understand the fragmentation of the segments taking place over social networks. There’s no consensus on which of the social media tools are likely to remain important,or how companies should use them.
“One way to look at it is as a brand ambassador or more of a street team where people on the street promote your brand,” said Andre Filip, chief executive at ELA Advertising.
But if a company is going to invest in building a social media presence, it needs to be able to better measure the effectiveness of such campaigns, ad executives said.
“The biggest challenge in those areas is on both sides of the fence, both for the client on ‘how do we monetize it’ and for marketers on ‘how do we leverage it,'” Olson said.
