From our experience, we have seen brands that have gotten fantastic ROI from their social networking campaigns. A large reason being that we helped them with a comprehensive approach.

It is not just about banner ads.
We need users to be engaged.

One solution is to have a branded application developed, or to brand an existing large application. Creating a fan page can help but should be cross-promoted with the app. Also a banner campaign to an external web site may not be effective – but a banner campaign pushing out a fan page, or even better, a custom application, really does work!

It’s like being at a party with friends when someone chimes in “hey, check out Tide”

I think we are obsessed with picking a winner that vanquishes all the losers.

Experience teaches us that rarely does a new thing kill all the old things, at least not for fifty years or so.

I hate the concept of stealth marketing, but I’m quite sure there are people being paid to tell me they’ve tried this product or that and how wonderful it is (lesson: pick your “friends” carefully).

I often think we shouldn’t need advertising at all, if we can just search for “pizza” whenever we want one. But then I think of all the times when an ad (in various forms) alerted me to a product I didn’t know existed, and of course, MUST HAVE!

I think now more than ever there is a need for ad agencies… experts who can advise everyone from a local coffee shop to Starbucks how to get their message out there, and the answer is now and will be for a long time: “every which way” with the expert being responsible for tuning the mix and, hopefully, demonstrating to the client that they have produced results.

I remain skeptical about Facebook simply because they don’t even do what they do all that well. Although they jumped out ahead of the other “socials” in a few respects, they don’t stand out now at all and in some ways have fallen behind.

(:…Well the most used application on the web is email. What’s teh #2 visited website across the entire www? Yahoo! Mail. Why not create a free email service, and call it Facebook! Mail? :) Grab eyeballs, because that’s what it’s about in advertising, impressions, eyeballs, audience. The more users you have the more companies want to advertise. Zuckerberg, model Facebook! Mail on Yahoo! and do everything Yahoo! Mail does but better. Next, build a search engine, do everything Google does, but better. Let me know when you’re done, and then we’ll leverage that social network of yours and make even bigger bucks. ~Sun Tzu~