Affiliate Classroom Blog

Social Network Marketing: Old Idea, New Form

Tuesday, July 25th, 2006 at 8:34 pm by Jeffrey Perren, AC Magazine

In college I had a friend who, as a high school teen, attended rock concerts. He didn’t go for the music. He sold T-shirts, though ’sold’ is something of a misnomer. All he had to do was show up and they were practically ripped out of his hands. (Come to think of it that happened literally, sometimes.) He made a serious chunk of change, ten bucks at a pop.

He understood social network marketing.

He didn’t have to do a lot of advertising. He didn’t spend a lot of money on marketing. But he knew where to find customers… where they congregate.

That’s the not-so-secret lesson of social network marketing. Many sites try to get customers to come where they live. Not a bad thing, as it works pretty well much of the time.

But social network marketing is going where the customers already are. While there you hope to sell them something you have good reason to believe they already want.

The team in charge of marketing the recent X-Men 3 movie did just that. They developed a portion of the MySpace site devoted to talking about the movie. They attracted a lot of people they already had good reason to believe would be interested. Those people told others. X-Men 3 garnered $122 million on opening weekend. ($400 million worldwide from May 26th to June 21st. Don’t you wish.)

No doubt that money wasn’t solely, or even primarily, the result of exposure and buzz on MySpace. But, as we all know, in marketing every little bit helps. And with the growth of MySpace and social networks in general, that little bit is getting a lot bigger very fast.

Something to think about while laundering that old Pat Benatar T-shirt.

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