Social media evolves
When NewsCorp bought MySpace in the summer of 2005 for $580 million, people thought they had over paid. This fall, Wall Street types were saying its real value will be $10-20 billion in a few years.
Even the small sites are doing fine. Gather.com, with just 122,000 registered users, raised its second $10 million round of funding this month. The interesting thing about Gather is its demographic. Almost three-fourths of the users are from 30 to 59 years old and have a college education. This is the elusive Baby Boom market that advertisers are dying to get the attention of.
PR Week had an article last week entitled "Boomers seek out advice via social-networking sites" (you can find it here). They note that:
Boomers lived through the significant social changes of the 1960s and’70s and tend to be more likely to follow the opinions of their peers than figures of authority. In reaching out to boomers online, it’s best to focus on social-networking Web sites.
They value peer relationships, for the most part, over authority. They are big users of chat rooms, message boards - they really like to seek out others’ opinions and, in some ways, would prefer an opinion from someone they don’t know, but whom they consider unbiased
Baby boomers are staying tapped into networks that we don’t necessarily think of as channels to reach seniors. They are aging, but not in attitude. In general, the pressure is on us to have more conversation, rather than trying to jam messages down their throats. They’ve lived through a lifetime of marketing, and they’re somewhat inured to it.
We are seeing an evolution of sorts: social media is expanding out from traditional teens & 20-somethings to other demographics. And it’s reaching into even more specific marketing opportunities.
For example, this month WAYN (Where are you Now?) a travel and lifestyle social network site raised $11 million in VC financing; TAKKLE closed a Series A round for high school athletes’ site; DailyStrength raised its first round of funding for a health support social network and Real Girls Media announced a $6 million financing round for a woman’s user-generated content site due to launch next year.
It might seem a little crazy: raising $6 million for a site that hasn’t even launched yet. But it all makes sense really. Advertisers are looking for ways to get to consumers. Traditional media, like TV and newspapers have either plateaued or are in decline. Only interactive is growing and has room to grow for many years. Social media is one of the hottest plays in interactive at the moment.
GigaOM reported today that American internet users spend an hour more online each week than they did in 2005, according to a study released today1 by The Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School. That’s 8.9 hours per week online on average, for the 77.6 percent of Americans who use the internet.
Use of online social tools is becoming more widespread, with 56.6 percent of online community members logging on at least once per day, 23.6 percent of all internet users posting photos online, 12.5 percent of internet users maintaining their own web sites, and 7.4 percent of internet users blogging. The percent posting photos and blogging have seen the most noteworthy gains, both more than doubling over the last three years.
So it’s no surprise we’re now seeing services emerge to better target that advertising. Lotame, for example, thinks it can target ads better by analyzing behavior on social networks. The idea is to provide software that bolts onto ad servers and feeds in information about people’s cookies, member profiles, interactions with other users, and responses to ads.
My money is on a site that can both draw boomers and serve a social market niche not yet touched by mainstream media. Watch this space…
3 Dec
