Are you a dobber? Please don’t refer a friend…
Nett Administrator
15 April 2008
15 April 2008
Before you invest another chunk of your marketing budget on a viral campaign, or refer five more friends so you can win that tropical holiday, stop and read. Stephen Murphy debunks the myths about online friend referrals.
Have you even signed up a friend’s email for your own personal gain? Online referral, or more accurately, ‘dobbing in your mates’, is becoming an increasingly common and, dare I say, almost an expected standard for developing of many online
social sites and promotional-style campaigns.
You know the deal: refer three friends and be entered in the draw to win a free ticket to Wonka World, a Club Med holiday or some other half-baked incentive. But how do your so-called mates feel about you selling out their spam-free email
address so you may by some off-chance win a lame prize? (By the way, I have never met a winner yet. Does anyone know if any of these prizes actually exist?)
There’s no doubt that friend referrals are on the increase and have often been part of success metrics for campaigns we have been involved in. But how effective are they and what is the true purpose of generating a potential false economy of
email sign-ups?
How many of them are truly interested in your products or services and fit your target audience demographic? What real value will a marketer gain from having a large, untargeted email database? Is there any realistic return on investment for
this type of marketing?
Similarly, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and the other myriad social networking sites are all about maximising sign-up volumes. Who has the fastest growing network? How vast is your database? Advertise with us – we have 20 million sign-ups!
Realistically, how many people are active members of each of these sites and how many of these people are real consumers?
I received so many invitations to join Facebook that I signed up just to see what the fuss was about. Once in, I realised that Facebook had nothing to offer me and was just a place for the socially inept and lonely, I remembered there was
a reason I didn’t hang out with these people in the real world, so managed to forget yet another password and never returned. But I am still counted among the millions of Facebook members.
Viral marketing, or customer endorsement, seems to have developed a type of cool online persona. If you create a successful viral campaign it’s deemed to be some type of mega-trend success. They even have awards for it.
But can these types of marketing campaigns really make an impact on your bottom line?
Whoever is selling this concept to marketing managers is doing a great job, with many businesses feeling the need to invest in any number of social, friend referral and customer endorsement campaigns. Ironically, most businesses are blissfully
unaware the majority of people currently ignoring their ads only have pocket-money as disposable income to purchase their products or services.
While humour, in my opinion, will always form the basis of any strong viral or referral campaign, the reality is that for every good viral marketing or endorsement, there are thousands that are utter failures. These do little more than annoy
and disenchant those who are unlucky enough to be the friend whose email address is distributed without their permission.
Personally, I can’t wait for the hype around social marketing to die as quickly as it rose. User-generated content is, after all, only as good as the user, and that’s where the dross emerges. Refer a Friend, which I’m officially renaming Dob in
a Mate, is only effective when executed to a specific target audience with a positive goal for everyone.
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Having read this article got me thinking.
I guess it really comes down to the digital strategy or the lack of.
I agree that viral campaigns are the "latest trends" to place the marketing budgets, but they can be very powerful and do have their place.
What I find poor, is the execution of viral campaigns. Like social networking, there should be a time and place to utilise these customer touch points. Thought and strategy which aligns with marketing KPI should be the main driving factors. Not just to make a quick dollar from a client.
Perhaps it is the role of digital agencies to work with their customers and provide knowledgeable and appropriate expert solutions to sell their customers products.
Viral campaign is not the problem. People are.
A successful marketing campaign would be when the campaign goals have been met. And p