Tocquigny Advertising and Design

This article is part two in a series on trends in web user experience — things that marketers should keep watching — both now and in the future. If you missed part one, it was on User Generated-Tagging.

The Social Web

Marketing on the internet used to be primarily one-way communication — just like the traditional media of TV, radio, and print. It was simply a new way for a small minority to broadcast a message to a larger group of people. But the internet has always been different from those older communication channels in one critical way: It is capable of accepting input from users — and that has opened the doors for the trend of socialization. Socialization on the web is huge already — and it's only going to get bigger.

By “socialization,” we’re talking about a set of two-way communication or “social” features that can be incorporated into websites: message boards, commenting, tagging, ratings and reviews, user profiles, etc. There are a number of ways these features are being implemented online.

Primarily, websites with social features fall into two categories:

1. Websites where social functionality has been tacked on to an existing site
2. Social networks — sites dedicated to providing social features and content

There are a number of popular social networks that everyone has heard of: Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn are probably the most well known. Marketers have an opportunity on most of these social networks to create a profile for their brand, create custom-branded functionality for the social network, and/or run social ads that promote their products. Platforms like Facebook's application framework and Google's OpenSocial allow marketers to essentially build mini websites that run within these existing social networks. A good example of this kind of social media marketing is the Facebook application Tocquigny created for World Vision.

In addition to the big social networking sites, many companies are beginning to create their own branded social networks — sites dedicated to facilitated social interactions around an organization’s mission or a brand. Tocquigny created one of the first branded social networks, BattleCry.com in 2006, a full year before this trend really became mainstream. You can read more about the BattleCry site in our portfolio.

In addition to dedicated social networks, social functionality can play a huge role in marketing websites and microsites. Take a look at the AMD 64 Seconds and World Vision mySponsorship case studies for good examples of how we've leveraged social features in campaigns for our clients.

How this changes the game

Whether a site is dedicated to social networking or just deploys a few social features, the two-way dialogue opened between companies and their target audience completely changes the game for marketers. Defining the essence of a brand has always been a collaborative effort between marketers and consumers — and the social web is accelerating the dialogue that elevates some brands to the top and causes others to collapse into irrelevance. The social web also provides a huge opportunity for companies to get real-time feedback from consumers and facilitate P2P dialogue between customers and prospective customers — all within a branded user experience.

Perhaps most important, social functionality has a huge impact on user experience — studies have shown that social interactions online make customers more likely to buy, increase brand affinity, and provide users with a positive brand experience.

What does this mean for marketers?

Marketers should look to incorporate social features into their websites and possibly even launch a dedicated, branded social network for their target audience.

Additionally, marketers can take advantage of existing social networks — Facebook, etc. — by running social ads, creating profiles for their brands, and building custom applications or widgets for those social networks.