'Super advocates' will make or break brands in 2008

According to a new report from Experian ClarityBlue and Hitwise, 2008 will herald the emergence of the social network ‘super advocate’ – the corporate organisation’s biggest ally or enemy.

Super advocates are highly influential figures in the online community, outspoken and with a loyal following, and with the power to make or break a brand’s reputation at will.

In The Impact of Social Networking in the UK, Experian predicts that this and a number of other major web-related trends will keep companies and their marketing departments fully occupied in the coming year.

If evidence of social networking’s popularity is required, analysis from Hitwise shows that Christmas Day 2007 was the busiest day ever for social networks in the UK. Facebook was the third most visited website in the UK over the Christmas period, pushing eBay into fourth place for the first time since January 2005. Furthermore, in 2007 social networking sites such as Facebook, Bebo and MySpace accounted for one in every five internet page impressions in the UK, and their mass appeal and importance to companies will only increase in 2008.

In this environment, Experian’s report predicts that the emergence of the super advocate will pose one of the biggest challenges facing companies trying to tap into user-generated content as an advertising and marketing channel. Super advocates will have a huge online following keen to know their thoughts on a company, its new products or problems that they have encountered. From a company’s perspective, these individuals will either be their most ardent supporters or just as easily their harshest critics, if handled badly.

Companies will need to quickly identify super advocates and work to keep these key influencers on side, avoiding commercialism at all costs and providing highly exclusive information to help win their respect.

Other key trends for 2008 are the rise of online cliques or ‘gated communities’ and the increasing value of social networks for viral and search marketing.

Unlike Facebook, Myspace and Bebo, web cliques are not designed for mass appeal and they will even go a step further than targeted communities such as SagaZone, a social network for the over-50s. Instead, these sites will appeal to powerful individuals – from City lawyers to executives – with stringent membership requirements to protect their exclusive and highly influential members. In line with Experian’s prediction for 2008, analysis from Hitwise shows that Linkedin, currently the leading social network for professionals, more than trebled its market share of UK internet visits during 2007.

Content from these new sites will drip-feed into the mass appeal social network sites for wider consumption. There is already a significant amount of traffic between the specialist and mass-market social networks – for example, Facebook is currently the second most visited website by Linkedin users – and in 2008, inter-community relationships will become far more prominent.

Organisations will need a dedicated marketing strategy focussed solely on monitoring specialist community sites and carefully introducing valuable content for members to disseminate. Subtlety and exclusivity will be the critical success factors – certainly not ‘recommend a friend’ marketing tactics.

2008 will also see the accelerated development of social networks for viral and search marketing. Social networks contain a massive amount of content, but at the moment it is very hard to find specific information. This year will see major improvements in sites’ search and navigation capabilities, making them a far more useful source of accessible information for marketers. Site owners will drive these developments, focussed on realising predicted value projections by opening up their platforms to third parties for commercial gain via permission-based advertising and marketing.

The Impact of Social Networking in the UK is available for download at www.experianim.com/socialnetworking

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