How would you feel if you were at a party and in the middle of your conversation with friends the guy hosting the party announced to everyone what your last purchase was and if you’d like one too you should come and talk to him? Kind of creepy huh?
How about if you went to a business networking party and were asked to sit through a “short presentation” before you could join the event with the host bar? “No you can’t have the names of my 5 closest friends.”
Contrast those scenarios with this, “We’d like to thank our sponsors for making today’s event possible. If you’d like to find out more about what they do they have a booth set up over on the side.” Not annoying at all. And while you may or may not visit their booth, you’re probably more inclined to thank higher of them than the previously mentioned annoying situations.
Back in 2006 Studio One and Next Century Media released some stats from a five year research project showing the advantages of a “True Sponsorship” vs. a “Common Sponsorship”.
“True” sponsorship is defined as information/entertainment brought “as a gift” to the consumer by a sponsor, where the “gift” is not tainted by the intrusion of sales pitches into the editorial content. The only sponsor mention is its logo and the phrase, “Brought to you by.” “Common” sponsorship is characterized by a number of “hard sell” display ads.
If Markets are Conversations it isn’t that far of a stretch to imagine Social Media Marketing takes place at parties. The study went on to quantify a persons intent to purchase after being exposed to “Sponsorship” as a “Persuasion Score”.
The SEI findings included the following:
- Brand perception among targeted consumer groups in “True Sponsorship” situations, improved consumer satisfaction, brand awareness, and intent to purchase, in every case.
- The average TV commercial has a “persuasion score” of 4.3% versus a “True Sponsorship” program score of 30.8% Online.
- In virtually every category, target groups indicated preference for sponsorship “exclusivity,” citing “common” sponsorship advertising as “clutter”.
- Target audiences became highly involved in the subject matter of the “True Sponsorship” programming, producing high levels of satisfaction with the material. This evoked positive “gratitude” effects towards the sponsor’s Brand.
- The study repeatedly confirmed the high level of consumer “engagement,” or persuasion effect, with a day-after sponsor recall percentage of 27 for “true sponsorship”- five times the number for TV commercials.
If your company wants to engage in Social Media Marketing or is wondering why they should, the above numbers are pretty convincing.
Of course the next question is; How? Do you try and build your own community? Do you tap an existing community? I could (and probably should) write an entire post to answer that question, I’ll give you the short answer.
- Does a community already exist? If yes then don’t try and recreate it.
- Is your company credible to this community? If no, find a partner who is and have them build the community.
- If one does not exist and you are credible then I would suggest building your own community.
And once again the question is; How? That answer I will defer for another time, but here’s one example of how we’re trying to do this at HP.
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