Social Networks - McKinsey

Unlocking the elusive potential of social networks
To realize the marketing potential of virtual activities, you have to make them truly useful for consumers.

There is much hype about social networks and their potential impact on marketing, so many companies are diligently establishing presences on Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms. Yet the true value of social networks remains unclear, and while common wisdom suggests that they should be tremendous enablers and amplifiers of word of mouth, few consumer companies have unlocked this potential. At Liberty Interactive, which comprises many specialty e-commerce companies, we wrestle daily with the question of how to realize the promise of social networks.
We do have pages on Facebook and active feeds on Twitter, but we never thought those steps alone would make a big difference to the performance of our companies. More recently, we have adopted a new mind-set: we think of word of mouth generated on social networks as a distinct form of media. This idea is more than a semantic detail. When you think of word of mouth as media, it becomes a form of content, and businesses can apply tried-and-true content-management practices and metrics to it. In addition, word of mouth generated by social networks is a form of marketing that must be earned—unlike traditional advertising, which can be purchased. We therefore concluded that we could succeed only by being genuinely useful to the individuals who initiate or sustain virtual world-of-mouth conversations.
So what does it mean to be useful in a world of virtual conversations enabled by social networks? Obviously, there are no generic solutions, and each company will need to invent and discover what makes sense for its unique situation. We have, however, learned a few lessons that can be encapsulated in two primary insights. First, a powerful way for a brand to be useful in the virtual world is to confer social importance on its users. Second, “virtual items” are critical to stimulating social interactions that may in turn generate word of mouth.


http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Marketing/Digital_Marketing/Unlocking_the_elusive_potential_of_social_networks_2623