Last week, Brian Morrissey of Adweek published a much-needed article confirming what viral marketers have been claiming for the past six months: viral and social media marketing will weather the coming (current?) recession. The industry may even gain significant market share. That is, if you believe Forrester Research.

The Plight and the Flight

Those of you who remember the plight of online advertising after the tech bubble crash and the flight to traditional marketing, may be surprised to hear that Forrester, predicts a flight to more affordable, long term social media and viral marketing during this coming recession. One of Forrester’s main reasons for believing this is that they see companies beginning to shift “their focus from building awareness to motivating consideration, a middle-of-the-funnel activity social media applications like discussion boards are ideally suited for.”

This middle-of-the-funnel focus is something we’ve seen quite a bit in our own business. Companies seem to be very interested in not simply “getting the word out” but also in building their status as thought leaders, building sites that add value to the consumer (entertainment value included) or designing campaigns that promote values beyond their brand. Liberty Mutual’s Responsibility Project site is a great example of a company embracing a mid-funnel, value-add website that is both in line with their brand and not heavy-handed when it comes down to selling you. In fact, the site never comes down to selling you at all (at least not in our 30+ minutes of playing around on it). On this site, the company chooses to move past the disappointingly common, thinly-veiled company site that is based on the-old media principles of A.I.D.A (for further clarification, ask a marketer or watch Alec Baldwin’s speech in ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’), and embraces a truly sales-free site that benefits the company only by associating the Liberty Mutual brand with positive discussion. Sites like these, while probably not lending themselves to easily-derived traditional metrics such as directly-trackable sales, require little upfront cost and provide an ongoing benefit for the community at large. Also, simply because the metrics are different than those of old-media, doesn’t mean social media marketing efforts are untrackable. If you have a question along those lines (as the Forrester analysts seem to), just check out the number of companies entirely based on viral and social media tracking.

Forrester’s report also predicts a decline in “online vehicles geared to building brand awareness.” Personally, I see all social media as “online vehicles geared to building brand awareness” with varying degrees of other goals added in, so I find this prediction hard to swallow. A few more questions that come to mind when considering their position are:

• Might it behoove some companies to take a longer term view–especially during a time when profits aren’t expected to be spectacular–and put in place long-term, low cost, viral and social media marketing campaigns that will bear fruit not only during the recession, but also the entire time the economy is back in the upswing?
• Why spend lots of capital on each television campaign when each campaign exists only for a limited time period?
• Why not pay significantly less money for a long (possibly infinitely so) campaign that engages users and drives them directly into the sales process?
  

The Tracking Question

Forrester points out that tracking social media and providing accurate data to prove the ROI is going to be a requirement during the recession if companies are going to adopt these new marketing outlets wholesale. While we agree with the need for accurate trackability, this reminds me of a MITX event that Matt and I recently attended where Jeff Taylor, Founder of both Monster and Eons made a great point that seemed to go over the heads of many in attendance.

He said, “People who advertise on my site are either REALLY happy or TOTALLY unhappy, there really is no middle ground.” His point, he went on to explain, is that people looking to track new media with old metrics are frequently unhappy. People who are willing to rethink of social media marketing as not just “the new tool I use” but as “a new way to engage people” are the ones taking full advantage of the changing online landscape and, consequently, aware of the full scope of benefits afforded by social media. Personally, I tend to agree with this view and think that Forrester might be missing the overall tracking argument slightly.

Forrester also goes on to point out, that P&G’s website as an example of well used online marketing. They point out that the site is “four times as effective as a similarly priced marketing program in traditional media.” Imagine what the effectiveness could be if the site actually added real value to the community and inspired real discussion rather than simply masqueraded itself as something other than a product-driven destination site?
Overall, Forrester’s report and Adweek’s commentary are both worth the read if only to encourage some forward-thinking and discussion about meaningful tracking metrics. I’d love to hear what others are predicting.