The Spirit of Web 2.0 New Media Lies in "Inter-personal Communication"
The meaning of "new media" is about giving up traditional broadcasting media and enabling interactive, inter-personal communication in a world that is turning into an intimate global village.
[+] Social networks become a new channel for branding
In the earlier stage of online advertising, website operators would ask advertisers to pay for 1.3 million exposures. Soon the CPC (cost per click) model became popular, and website operators started to tell advertisers to pay for 1.3 million clicks.
In the case of traditional advertising, it is aimed to produce an impression of the brand on you by repetitive exposures, so that you'll remember to buy this product when you do shopping in a store. In the earlier stage of the Internet, online advertising followed this thinking, and advertisers were told that the branding effect existed even if users did not click on the advertisements. Although it does not sound very persuasive, it still sells to big brand advertisers having huge budgets.
In spite of the growing popularity of CPC model, which has taken a good share of the market of medium and small advertisers, advertisements sold on the basis of exposures still can pull the money out of big advertisers' pockets.
Now we are entering the era of Web 2.0, yet major brand advertisers and website operators still stick to the old-fashioned concepts and 1.0 mindset. In fact, online marketing has entered the era of "pay for 1.3 million users' in-depth participation."
The point here is "inter-personal communication," which is exactly the strength and spirit of Web 2.0. Simply put, traditional advertising is about "I play and you watch," while Web 2.0 advertising is about "I tell you, you tell her/him, and the brand quickly spreads in the social networks."
[+] The Pepsi case
Here I'm going to share with you a recent case, which is classic in Web 2.0 marketing. The event in this case lasted for one month, attracting 1.3 million users to register, 120 million votes in total, and 6.8 bulletin board messages posted by users.
This event was the annual online event of Pepsi, which was called "Your Picture Appear on a Can." That is, contestants submitted their pictures and got selected by consumer votes. Those who garnered the highest votes can put their pictures on the Pepsi can.
The competition was divided into two stages. At the first stage, Pepsi together with five participating websites held tryouts respectively. One participating website, 51.com, attracted as many as 1.3 million users, which was more than twice as many as the total of the other four websites, to join the competition.
Such contrast was largely because that 51.com is completely a Web 2.0 website, which is characterized by real-time interaction. Therefore we need to look at the difference between this particular website and other traditional blogs websites.
First of all, 51.com is a kind of Social Networking Service, including blogs, photo albums and online communities. Users
write their online diaries while reading others', and they can set up their own "friend list."
[+] How brands spread in a Web 2.0 website?
Not like traditional blog websites, 51.com does not emphasize on content. For many blog websites, the first page after logging in is the user's own article, but for 51.com, the first page tells you who have visited, who on your friend's list are online or have posted a new article.
This increases user interaction on 51.com. The system will inform you about who visits your article shortly. If you link to a visitor's blog and leave a comment, the system will inform that visitor about your visit, which may trigger another visit to your blog. This is how spontaneous personal interaction begins.
Because of such real-time interactivity strengthened by immediate system alerts about your friends' activities, users of 51.com almost get hooked on the website. This makes 51.com a robust platform for "inter-personal communication." An online campaign can spread very quickly on this platform.
In this Pepsi campaign, 51.com first pushed the news of this campaign through various channels to draw people in. For everyone signed up for the competition, there would be an article with a big picture "Vote Me for Pepsi Star" automatically produced by the system on the front page of the contestant's blog.
The posting of this new blog article would trigger a notification to those on the blogger's friends list. When these people came to visit, they would learn about Pepsi's new event. Some of them might become contestants and thus set off another round of notification....
[+] Interaction and alliances among social networks amplify the effects of communication
As such, the spread of inter-personal communication takes place in 51.com with a terrifying speed. Here we see the manifestation of "Six Degree of Separation," which is a popular theory normally associated to social networking, particularly for a business purpose.
At the first stage of the Pepsi star competition, there were also other participating blog service providers. Yet they did not take the advantage of real-time interaction; instead, they relied on the traditional method of one-way broadcasting, which is much less effective in spreading the message and drawing in more users.
Most interestingly, there were quite a few voluntary activities going on among the user communities of 51.com, which was beyond expectation. Here are some examples:
1) Those who did not join the competition tried to canvass for their friends who were contestants on their blogs. This helped increase exposure of the event.
2) Users of 51.com can start their own groups. Some group owners can be very powerful, as the size of these groups
can reach some tens of thousands under good management. Group owners could ask members to vote and canvass for them.
3) Groups can form alliances. For example, First Alliance of 51.com has as many as 2 million members. Each group within the alliance could select its own candidate to compete for representing the entire alliance, with the support of its 2 million members, to compete in the Pepsi contest.
[+] Web 2.0 marketing is about inter-personal communication
Many people argued that such competition was nothing more than beauty contest. However, to everybody's surprise, the winner of 51.com tryout was a monk nicknamed "silly hermit." In fact, his picture has been on the Pepsi can before you read this article.
Yet it is not that surprising. Firstly, 51.com with 80 million registered users of various kinds is a small society of itself. Moreover, users' voluntary concerted action as shown in the above-mentioned example can be applied in many aspects.
For those participated in this event through joining the competition or voting or canvassing for contestants, together their friends within six degrees of separation, the brand of Pepsi will remain imprinted in their mind for a long time.
What Pepsi got in this campaign was 1.3 million heavily engaged users, which had much greater effect than 1.3 million
banner clicks.
Did you notice that the model of Web 2.0 marketing is basic inter-personal communication! Inter-personal communication works very slowly in the real world, so we need mass media such as television to do mass communication.
Yet, because of the birth of Web 2.0, the cost for inter-personal communication has dropped substantially and the efficiency has increased. Therefore we see a very paradoxical thing that marketing communication will go back to the basic model of inter-personal communication from traditional "broadcasting" media of mass communication.
These days we hear a lot of "new media" things from the media and people in the industries. What this term really means is about giving up traditional broadcasting media and enabling interactive, inter-personal communication in a world that is turning into an intimate global village.
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- Today in History
The Spirit of Web 2.0 New Media Lies in "Inter-personal Communication" - 2007/08/05
The Good Old Days of ECommerce - 2005/08/08
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