Facebook and Social: The New Mass Media

I’m confident that you’ve encountered at least some of the recent shock and awe data about the growth of social media – like the fact that Facebook’s members represent a population larger than every country in the world except China and India.  But how does the scale of social relate to the tangible and more traditional marketing channels that you know you and (may) love?

• A recent study by Deutsche Bank found that 7.5 million people tune into Oprah every day, whereas 43 million people play a Zynga game each day
• Facebook’s 500M strong audience now dwarfs the 106M that tuned into the 2010 Super Bowl
• Coca Cola has daily access to an audience of 10M Fbook fans vs only 348k monthly unique visitors to its website.  Similarly, Starbucks.com has 1M monthly unique visitors vs 12M fans on Facebook for daily communication
• As much content is uploaded to YouTube every 60 days as the three major networks have created in the past 60 years
• Nearly one-third of holiday shoppers surveyed say their purchases are being influenced by social-media interaction (source: ComScore)
• Meteor Solutions’ found that influencers –- those who share campaigns across their social graph –- can directly influence 40 to 60 percent of all visits to an advertising campaign page

As a result, major brands continue to quickly reengineer their marketing efforts around social and the story and pace evolves on weekly basis

• According to a recent article in USA Today, Procter & Gamble has pulled the plug on soap operas after 77 years.  According to P&G’s Marc Pritchard, "digital (and social) media has pretty much exploded…it's become very integrated with how we operate, it's become part of the way we do marketing."   And just recently, P&G has started selling Pampers diapers on Facebook, offering a mobile app enabling women to track menstrual cycles and ask experts questions, and, as we know, has used using social media to turn the Old Spice brand into a pop-culture icon.  Moreover, P&G now devotes the majority of its enormous research budget to social listening.
• Oreo, like several other food and beverage companies, now drives virtually all of its marketing to FaceBook…adding thousands of fans daily

So you are not a consumer products company?  Well…other consumer-focused industries and the B2B world are not going to be far behind.  As an example, our own recent research in the generally conservative hospital industry indicates that Digital/Social Marketing will switch places with Traditional Marketing in the next two years, either being the lead channel(s) or, at least sharing the lead with Traditional.  And this is the Hospital Industry! Change is happening.  Faster and faster.  Social is quickly moving from interesting and experimental to core.  Social Media is inarguably Mass Media.  Our suggestion:  If 2010 was a year for getting a foundation in place, 2011 should be a year to aggressively leverage your platforms as part of your integrated marketing programs.  Make it a primary goal to extract a lot of learning in 2011 and start thinking about social as a core part of all marketing programs.