By Lauren Quan, Associate Marketing Manager

Facebook reached me via word-of-mouth, far before I had even heard of word-of-mouth and buzz marketing. I was a college sophomore, perusing my friend’s AIM profile, which included a link to the site.

Back in that day there were no applications, games, or even photos to overwhelm me. The sleek blue and white interface was a welcome change from the brief fling I had with Friendster. It was clean, uncluttered, and blissfully ad-free.

When I started working in the digital space, I was surprised by marketers’ growing obsession with Facebook and inability to understand it. What was there to understand? Growing up in an atmosphere where everyone was always online and everyone constantly updated their AIM away messages to show their whereabouts when not online, Facebook made sense as a way to keep track of friends while multi-tasking, AIMing, doing homework, and so on. Because the sign-up process required a valid college/.edu email address, people tended to use their real first and last names. There was a level of transparency and honesty lacking from the dead Friendster and perv-producing MySpace.

At its heart, Facebook was pretty much a virtual, interactive yearbook that helped people stay in touch with college friends. I still check it once a day and prefer it to the vastly overcluttered MySpace or the glorified address book Linked In.

I’m not the only one who checks these social networks daily. According to a recent Forrester report, 80% of young adults and 30% of adults are using social networking sites. These numbers keep growing, as the site averages more than 20 million unique viewers per month.

These large figures have not gone unknown to advertisers. Facebook’s high volume of targeted, engaged web users is a marketer’s dream, and it’s no longer an ad-free zone. Advertisers have enjoyed success with Facebook advertising by creating branded groups and allowing users to become fans. Maybelline, for example, has created a group to promote its cosmetics. BMW is also in the Facebook loop.

Is all hope lost if brands are not entertainment or retail-focused? Not at all. Companies like Ernst and Young have created recruiting Facebook groups, with people assigned to actively respond to questions and give feedback to potential job-seekers. Obviously, such a page would draw fresh college grads in search of a first job. This network has more than 20,000 users.

Overall, companies just need to be aware of the target audience and dream up campaigns that really add value for the users and allow them to engage with the brand. For example, in a recent campaign we ran for THQ, our buzz team crafted an alternate reality game to promote the company’s new first-person shooter, Frontlines: Fuel of War. After signing up at an interactive microsite, users were plunged into a scavenger hunt that had them reading blogs, discovering secret YouTube channels, befriending characters on Facebook, and more, in their quest to uncover the secrets of the world of Frontlines: Fuel of War.

Another way to engage the audience is with widgets. Good widgets should be fun, interactive and useful to the audience. For samples of successful widgets, one need look no further than this online dating widget or the popular Scrabulous widget. People who may not have ever touched the vintage board game edition of Scrabble are flocking in droves to play it online against complete strangers.

Regardless of whether marketers choose to go the widget/application route, the group route, or take a different route altogether, they need to follow the rules of good social media advertising. They need to understand the audience, engage with the community, be completely open and transparent, and above all, remain active and constantly engaged. It’s important to encourage open conversation and feedback, both positive and negative. One need look no further than the failure of flogs to see that trying to trick your audience just won’t work.

Facebook will never again be the ad-free, adult-free, and exclusive social networking platform it was when I first joined. However, I still want to use it to keep in touch with my friends and engage in lighthearted virtual interactions with them. With constant new innovations, (such as the news feed and open application platform, to name a few), Facebook keeps me engaged as other social networks scramble to keep up. If Facebook and advertisers continue to innovate and evolve while not bombarding users with ad spam (a la MySpace) then even legacy users such as myself will continue to visit for years to come.

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 9:48 am and is filed under Red Bricks Media, Social Networking, User-Generated Content, Web 2.0, Web 3.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.