Case Study: Social Media Marketing Done Correctly

I recently wrote a post for John Chow on a case study of HTC and how they effectively ran a social media marketing campaign. The full post can be read here but I have pasted an excerpt below.

“An increasing number of social media websites are finding that the only real way to structure advertisements so that they have any significant ROI for sponsors is to integrate them into the social nature of the website itself. StumbleUpon did this through the use of “paid stumbles” where they charged $.05 a visitor from the StumbleUpon toolbar and Digg rolled out a similar program soon after showcasing “sponsored stories” amongst the other submissions on the home page.

If you are going to pay to advertise on social media websites, this is the way it is to be done. This is the only way to force readers to seriously consider clicking on your “advertisement” as it is essentially part of the content, essentially being the key word. To retain any sort of credibility, any social media website adopting such advertising forms will display a visible, although often times discrete, “sponsored post” message to let users know the link is an ad. However, since the ad is part of the content, users can’t help but to take notice of it and thus if intrigued they will click. This is a far cry from traditional sidebar banner advertisements which many users will glance over without any consideration.”