The Future of Applications: Branded Engagement and Communities

Recently, Forrester released 'The Connected Agency', in which Peter Kim and Mary Beth Kemp discuss how marketing agencies will change over the next five keys to become community facilitators, acting as the gateway between brands and opt-in interest groups.

This came at a very interesting time for us at iNetwork - within a couple of days from reading the report, we had two clients who wanted almost exactly that - they wanted us to help them build specific interest communities in order to allow selective access to them from relevant brands. More and more, our view of all applications and social media technologies is moving from conversations to communities (at a time when many people are still making the move from statements to conversations):

Statements -----> Conversations -----> Communities

I decided to write this post because despite the great things being written all over the blogosphere about the nature of social network applications, there still seems to be some confusion between old and new media. This has been shown very strongly in the continuing search for CPM in social networks and applications, and the amazed headlines when monetisation doesn't seem to be working that well.

I hate to say this, but MONETISING SOCIAL MEDIA IS NOT ABOUT GETTING USERS TO CLICK ON ADS. I seriously believe that companies like RockYou, Slide etc are going to realise that they cannot effectively make money by trying to create applications which have the sole aim of getting users to click somewhere else. I'd bet that they've made the most money where they've offered brands the opportunity to access their 'communities' of users in a meaningful way (e.g. Sony branding up the vampires application for a vampire movie).

Users have been getting sick of gimmicky applications, and so have platforms - note the huge crackdown on application spam by Facebook over the last month. Over the next year, I believe that we're going to see a huge step-change in the industry, and a big move to engaging, community based applications either branded specifically, or giving access to a number of brands. In Shaking the Money Tree of Multi Platform Social Networks, Jia Shen noted that the ratio of success for applications of social networking platforms is higher than for stand-alone platforms. Add that to the easy install and integration with the social graph, and it's clear why applications will continue to be a brilliant platform for engaging with users and interest based communities.

I plan to write more on this, as it's an important topic. 'Adverts' will not go away, and are still relevant when people are searching for information (which can include when they are browsing news sites) - as long as it's relevant. I'd recommend you read the Forrester report, and think about how this can practically apply to your social marketing activities today - not just in 5 years time.