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Ad Money Will Play "Follow the Leader" to the King of Links

21 Apr 2009

FollowTheLeader

What any advertising campaign ultimately wants to achieve is an
improvement in company profits.

Historically this has been done with banners to interrupt and saturate potential customers with brand recognition.  A small percentage of viewers will feel compelled to purchase the product. In the modern (ever changing) business landscape this is usually achieved by being in the right place, at the right time.  Say I'm web browsing for great fishing rods in San Francisco, if you showed up at the top of Google you're in a prime spot to further your business goal of making the connection between your business and me (an interested and willing buyer). 

Increasingly, the flow of web links is being made between individuals via social media sites.  Your good fishing buddy who knows the Bay area, shares a link to his favorite supply store. As focused communities become populated across geographic barriers, local quality referrals become more likely.  But what if you want to know what store fishermen prefer in San Francisco?  You could simply use twitter search for fishing san francisco.  In real time you could send a message to several individuals who are interested in fishing in that region. Successful social media will judge individuals by the quality of their referrals, the best will be known as field experts.  This expertise will garner increased customer reaction and social pull, as well as equivalent advertising dollars.  Social networks that reward (profit sharing) their strongest referrers (crowd sourced link voting) and content builders will succeed, while those that try to hoard income will be abandoned like ghost towns.

A quick background for those unfamiliar with web advertising:

In the current web advertising system there are several cost structures for paid ads.