Cutting Through the Facebook Hype
Very, very few close friends of mine are on Facebook, and for those very few, their reasons for trying Facebook are similar to mine: We're learning how it fits into PR and marketing for our clients. More importantly, a large part of the group yet to adopt Facebook is comprised of former colleagues in public relations--and they still are in related fields. This past weekend, at a holiday party, I had to explain the concept of Facebook to many of them.
I wonder if, as a result, I should be more skeptical of the immediate impact of Facebook on my clients' work. Facebook's clientele is still young, and it is hardly the mainstream. While I stand by the predictions of many in terms of the impact Facebook and other social networking sites will have on PR, the immediate affect of those programs on a mainstream audience is a question of mine.
From a broader perspective, my experience this weekend--teaching many of my hip friends about what I think is the hippest new application on the Internet--demonstrates the important role as "perspective provider" that everyone at Schwartz serves for our clients. Since we are outside consultants for our clients, we need to be careful in cutting through the hype of new marketing tools.
I spoke with a potential Schwartz client recently who used Facebook with great success. I told him that for his needs, this made sense--his web application was for college students. But for any program that wants to target the mainstream, Facebook is only part of the equation. There is still no better approach to reach a mainstream audience than to target reporters who write widely syndicated stories. At least for now.
I say this despite some very recent research that notes how upwards of 40-percent of Facebook's users are over 35, according to Forrester's Jeremiah Owyang, and there are a total of 40-50 million users. That means some 20 million Facebook users are over 35. I guess my social scene is no longer part of tech communications early-adopter audience.
There are several nice summaries available of Owyang's presentation at the Web Community Forum last week, and certainly Facebook is discussed within any brainstorm related to promotion of consumer technology offerings. However, what I have seen in practice--both at holiday parties this season and with Schwartz's PR programs, is that Facebook is only the newest of many tools in the arsenal for promoting to the consumer audience. We're watching Facebook carefully, but only as part of broader programs--and numerous "outside-the-box" tactics--to reach consumers and grow traffic.
Posted by Ross Levanto on December 11, 2007 at 2:15 PM
