So many questions. How do we leverage social networking sites for the Gospel? To do this we need to understand how advertisers use these sites and attempt to “monetize” them. To understand, think about this:
It all comes down to purchase-intent. When a user goes to Google, or any other search or vertical site for that matter, and types in “Laptop” or “Car Insurance” or “flight to Atlanta,” in most cases they are declaring their intent to purchase one of the aforementioned products in the near future. This is one of the main benefits of advertising on a search engine or a vertical site. Google’s success stems from it being the world’s #1 aggregator of consumer purchase-intent data.
Internet users spend roughly 5% of their time declaring purchase intent (i.e. searching) on search results pages that seize approximately 40% of Internet ad spending, and 95% of their time browsing ad-supported content (i.e. social networking sites, news sites, Web-based email sites) that are mainly unsold or sold for relatively low rates and difficult to monetize via contextual means.
So, if we think of people searching for felt need issues, we see that they are showing intentionality- if the same stats work of a lost soul searching for solice and answers to his life issues, the question is how to turn that search into a purchase (personal contact, conversion, small group, house church)?
Please comment on this below.
March 12, 2008 at 4:24 am |
It would seem that to make Facebook work for our purposes, we really need someone who is willing to have a very open identity from what i read in the casestudy. It needs someone who is willing to spend a good bit of time online.