Brandweek recently ran a lengthy article about behavioral targeting. “BT,” or contextual targeting, keyword targeting or psychographical targeting all roughly refer to the same idea: that a marketer uses your own actions or profile to serve up advertising that might be of interest to you. This is pretty standard stuff that has migrated its way from the generic web onto social networks such as MySpace and Facebook.
I did think, however, that the notion of “influencer marketing” was interesting in this context. As with a coming post on how Vaseline built a social network around one key person who helped spread the word about a new product, influencer marketing would mean crafting a message based on how many people you reach in your life and around which issues or topics you may have the greatest influence.
Say I have 350 “friends” on Facebook, 250 of whom are part of the “New York” network. I might get served an ad for a local New York service, the value of which could increase for me based on the number of individuals to whom I send the offer. Or maybe I have 100+ female friends, all over the age of 50: an audience that consumerreports.org is interested in targeting for paid site subscriptions. The site might not only promote specifically to me, but could offer me a free 6-month subscription for referring 15 friends (with verified email addresses). These are examples of how the ”influencer” idea might be used on an “outbound” basis – that’s me communicating outwardly to individuals in my network.
Targeting could be used to equal effect on an “inbound” basis: if a Facebook member regularly posts a lot of positive messages about Barack Obama on his profile to which many people regularly comment, the campaign might want to reach out to that person and ask him to host a house party (particularly if the influencer lives in a zip code that is underpenetrated).
We’ll see if marketers start experimenting with overt “influencer” messaging on social network sites. It holds promise.
social networks Facebook MySpace influencer marketing
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