Learning and Profiting from Online Friendships
I’ve been thinking a lot about online relationships/friendships and how useful they can be for businesses (see my Sponsor my Status post and the subsequent domain registration). Coincidentally, I stumbled into this BusinessWeek article, Learning and Profiting from Online Friendships. Loads of great information here. It’s likely I’ll file this away to continually reference (as with my Monocle post). Here are the blurbs that caught my attention in the first read.
Marketers are leading the way. They’re finding that if our friends buy something, there’s a better-than-average chance we’ll buy it, too.
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The only scarce resource is attention.” So how do we figure out where to direct it?
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For most of us, the business value of networked friends is tied to a third area, personal opportunity.
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The easiest way is to get tips from friends. They’re our trusted sources. At least a few of them know us better than any algorithm ever could. Little surprise, then, that the companies most eager to command our attention are studying which friends we listen to.
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Statistically, friends tend to behave alike. A couple of years ago researchers at Yahoo found that if someone clicked on an online ad, the people on his or her instant chat buddy list, when served the same ad, were three to four times more likely than average to click on it. It makes sense. Friends share interests.
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Marlow’s team recently carried out a study to determine how close we are to our friends online. They looked at how often people clicked on their friends’ news or photos, how often they communicated, and if the communications traveled in both directions. Studying this data, they determined that an average Facebook user with 500 friends actively follows the news on only 40 of them, communicates with 20, and keeps in close touch with about 10. Those with smaller networks follow even fewer. What can this teach advertisers? People don’t pay much attention to most of their online friends. By focusing campaigns on people who interact with each other, they’ll likely get better results.
Tags: advertising, marketing, relationships, social media