Adweek recently published a good recap. of the social marketing landscape that lays out the current brands active in the space, and several of the companies that are attempting to bring services to market that somehow leverage word-of-mouth.
The article does a good job representing the spectrum of approaches that social marketing agencies are taking to drum up buzz that in some ways mirror some very fundamental dichotomies that exist in public relations – is it better to instruct or influence – state or spin your message?
As Pete Blackshaw, CMO of Nielsen BuzzMetrics explains, “There are many things advertisers can do to influence the outcome, but there’s a high order of finesse and sensitivity needed.”
In traditional public relations, the repercussions for a bit of spin gone wrong are normally not that severe (provided the spin is mild). In social media however, there can be serious repercussions, which raises the stakes considerably for many of the companies that are focused on the space.
At any rate, I felt the article did a good job listing out some of the emerging social media services but I thought it might help to try and group them. Note – I parsed out social marketing services (those that are more focused on leveraging word-of-mouth) and focused primarily on social media services (those that are primarily online).
Here is how I see it playing out:
Bucket 1: Social media enabled services – These services are communications-oriented but have adapted to better integrate with the social media paradigm. PRWeb would fit into this category because the initial benefit proposition was about cutting through the media and communicating direct-to-consumer through news aggregators and search engines. Over time, the press releases have incorporated social media trappings like trackbacks, social bookmark links and other tools that recognize the growing importance of social media.
Bucket 2a: Social media oriented services (outreach) - These are the groups that have mortgaged the house and put all their chips in leveraging purely social media to create buzz. PayPerPost would be a prime example because it is entirely oriented around connecting brands with social media influencers. It has really been forged in the paradigm and oriented around creating buzz through social media but it is not entirely social media itself. In fact, it bears a greater resemblance to an advertising affiliate network than to a true open network. Collactive could also fall into this bucket.
Bucket 2b: Social media oriented services (monitoring) – I think conceptually, this bucket is probably very similar to bucket 2 except their primary goal is to collect and analyze data in social media. Radian6 and Relevant Noise would be good examples of this type of service.
Bucket 3: True social media services – I would say the third bucket of services are those that are oriented at impacting social media in some way, but can themselves be considered true forms of social media. The distinction is sort of hazy here, but I think the manner in which the user interfaces with the service will be fundamentally different than before. I think LinkedIn is a good example of the approach because it provides a very social media-driven approach to networking, but it is not really PR/Marketing consumed.
Over time, some of the services from the other buckets will evolve into this bucket; others will simply be new offerings in the market.
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