Social platforms were the rave last year and you would think that the big boys in the business would have made a lot of money dabbling in social media, right? I sure did but I was wrong. According to experts, social media did not produce the results that marketers were aiming for. Clickz published a report stating this recently:
That is to say, creating campaigns for social platforms is hard work that frequently produces marginal results, and upbeat case studies are few and far between.
“Not many marketers have really cracked the code,” said Amy Auerbach, SVP and director of digital at Initiative. “It’s such a utility for Web users.”
Google is one firm whose efforts on social networking sites are “not monetizing as well as expected,” according to previous CFO George Reyes.
It’s not that they have not tried. In fact, you see ads everywhere in social platforms like Facebook. In fact, various firms have tried lots of tactics to get marketing in social platforms off the ground:
Reyes and co-founder Larry Page told investors back in January that the firm has done “lots of experimenting” with social network advertising. Google represents ads on MySpace, its own Orkut service, and numerous other properties.
“We have a huge amount of social networking inventory,” said Page. “It varies quite a bit how well we monetize, based on a number of factors, some of which we understand, some of which we don’t.”
This just goes to show how difficult it is to predict just how people will react to campaigns. Personally, I like social platforms the way they are and the ads, so far, have not been bothering me at all. At the same time, they are not catching my eye either. Maybe that’s where they have work to do?
