The Social

If you're running a business that has a presence in a virtual world, market research firm Gartner thinks you might want to make sure your employees' avatars aren't dressed like Lady Gaga at the VMAs.

"Companies with codes of conduct for other Web activities, such as blogging, should be able to extend those policies into virtual environments," a release Wednesday from Gartner announcing its new report "Avatars in the Enterprise: Six Guidelines to Enable Success" explained. "However, because 3-D environments add the visual dimension, they will need to make sure that their policies also cover dress codes."

That means your avatar might want to lose the sparkly pink torpedo bra, metallic leggings, and giant bat wings. When it's representing your company, that is.

The presence of businesses in virtual worlds like Second Life is nothing new--and has been much derided in recent years. But according to Gartner, it's still on the rise, particularly when it comes to training and virtual meetings. "Avatars are creeping into business environments and will have far reaching implications for enterprises, from policy to dress code, behavior, and computing platform requirements," the release explained. Gartner estimates that 70 percent of enterprises will be regulating the avatars of employees who use virtual worlds for business.

Two years ago, Gartner put out a study detailing the risks and pratfalls of doing business in virtual worlds, among them the difficulty of brand and reputation management. Now it's getting more specific: Gartner now says that employees ought to know how to operate their avatars properly, use the same degrees of discretion and professionalism that they do on social-networking sites, and even keep separate avatars for personal and professional use.

During New York's inaugural "Social Media Week" festivities earlier this month, media-industry research firm Abrams Research (that's "Abrams" as in MSNBC's Dan Abrams, for the news junkies out there) conducted a survey about the perception of various social-media services within the industry. The results weren't too surprising: 30 percent of respondents would pay for Facebook (keep in mind that these respondents are people already active in the social-media world). They encourage businesses to think seriously about Twitter for marketing. Etc.

That's all good and fine. But what we really found hilarious was the extra-credit question, which asked respondents to pair up one suffering print-media brand with a social-networking service for the ultimate media mashup. (Or, as the survey called it, a "shotgun wedding.") The best suggestion would receive a $500 charity donation in the winner's name.

The winner, according to the research firm's release, was MIT business school student Amanda Peyton, who put up a relatively straightforward pairing of Reader's Digest and social-news site Digg.

"Take Reader's Digest, add Digg, get AARP to sponsor," Peyton's suggestion read. "Create Digg-type ranking system within RD website. Call it 'Seniors Speak: Content Ranked By Seniors, For Seniors.' Baby Boomers are getting older and 50+ community is tech-savvy and loves targeted products. Digg gets an entirely new demographic. Site can start with only RD content and then expand."

One of the runners-up, Samantha Duenas, devised a way to bring fashion tome Vogue into the digital age while bringing a whiff of exclusivity to the News Corp.-owned MySpace. "(Old Media) is going broke, MySpace is falling off a steep cliff into uncool. Vogue should make all of their world issues digitally accessible through MySpace for an annual subscription fee," Duenas wrote. "Models, photographers, stylists would have MySpace profiles with exclusive photos and media only accessible to subscribers. Usage of photos/media on blogs would tag back to MySpace."

That's interesting. Some of the non-winners, however, were just plain funny.

"High Times magazine and Twitter," one respondent said. "It will give a whole new dimension to the term 'tweetup.'"

"AARP magazine with Facebook," another suggested, "since all of our moms are on Facebook now anyway."

There were also some blatantly obvious ones: "Hustler and AdultFriendFinder. Talk about a match made in heaven." Along similar lines, "Playboy and Facebook. Just because I'd love to see a 'Poke a Playmate!' promotion." Abrams Research said it also received a suggested match of the New York Times and naughty video hub YouPorn, but that no explanation was provided. Figures.

Another one of the entries was an elaborate epic poem about magazine giant Conde Nast, penned by blogger Katie Baker. It didn't win, but her valiant rhyming efforts were recognized.

Market research firm eMarketer has cut yet another ad spending estimate for 2009, and this time it's social networks. The social-network advertising industry is now pegged at $1.3 billion next year, down from $1.8 billion. For 2008, it's been lowered to $1.2 billion from $1.4 billion.

That's a big drop. Looking at individual social networks, eMarketer has cut its estimates for MySpace from $755 million to $585 million this year, and from $265 million to $210 million for Facebook.

"As consumer usage of social networking sites continues to flourish, advertising has not kept pace," a release from eMarketer explained. "In 2008 and 2009, the recession will affect all forms of online ad spending, but experimental formats, such as the ones available on social networks, which cannot always demonstrate a proven return on investment, will be hit particularly hard."

eMarketer has already cut its ad spending estimates for the overall Web multiple times this year.

But marketers shouldn't write off social networks entirely, the report said. "Monitoring social network discussions about a brand or product and interacting with consumers in a community are still valuable--and probably essential--activities."

Facebook likes to trumpet the value of "trusted referrals"--recommendations and ads with the endorsements of members of your friends list. But a new study from Jupiter Research, commissioned by analytics company BuzzLogic, says that consumer purchases are more likely to be influenced by what they read on a blog versus what their social-networking rosters recommend.

Half of all those surveyed who identify as "blog readers" (people who read more than one blog per month, a fifth of total survey respondents) say that blogs are important to them when it comes to making purchasing decisions. But they don't necessarily find them to be all that reliable: only 15 percent of blog readers, and five percent of all those surveyed said that in the past year they had trusted a blog to help them make a purchase decision.

That's still higher than the number of people who said they used social-network recommendations, though: ten percent of "blog readers," and four percent of all those surveyed.

Results of the survey are similar when it comes to advertising: a quarter of "blog readers" say they trust ads on blogs that they read (versus 43 percent on "familiar" or mainstream media sites), but a slightly lower 19 percent say they trust the ads on social networks.

So what does all this mean? Well, it's good news for BuzzLogic, which tracks blogger influence for clients and has seen blog advertising pushed aside a bit on Madison Avenue in favor of "appvertising" and social ads. Aside from that, the real take-away point is that the results seem to indicate most blogs are less mainstream than you might think: Only a fifth of respondents say they read a blog at least once a month.

That's actually really surprising--or maybe blogs have become so ingrained on the Web that people don't even know they're reading them.

Adam Sarner, an analyst with market research firm Gartner, has projected that over 75 percent of Fortune 1000 companies with Web sites will have undertaken some kind of online social-networking initiative for marketing or customer relations purposes. But, he added in an interview with CNET News, 50 percent of those campaigns will be classified as failures.

Sarner plans to present his results at the annual Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2008, which takes place October 12-16 in Orlando, Fla.

"(Businesses) will rush to the community and try to connect, but essentially they won't have a mutual purpose, and they'll fail," Sarner said. By a "mutual purpose," he means a way to serve both the company putting out the campaign and the audience interacting with it: finding that balance is not easy. The quirkiest and most addictive campaigns often provide little value for the company and turn out to be fads, whereas marketing efforts on the Web often don't go over as well with the public.

He cited the Facebook craze as an example. The social network is "more for the community than it is for the bottom line," and it's tough for marketers to get their message in on a site that's focused on communicating with your friends rather than finding stuff to buy. One of its more business-savvy advertising options, Beacon, on the other hand, was "more about the business trying to get value than it is actually about the customer." Some Facebook users didn't like it, and a public backlash ensued.

Sarner's research deduced that by 2012, fully half of all purchases, whether online or offline, will have some Web-based component to them. That could mean searching for product reviews, reading about a new product on a blog, or comparing prices even if the purchase is ultimately made in a store.

There's obviously no universal solution to social-media advertising and marketing, because every company is different. But Sarner offered a preliminary tip: to make sure that there's a clear reason why such a campaign is instituted, and "get people talking" isn't enough. "Are you discovering what's going to be the new black next season?" he suggested as an example of a trendspotting-focused strategy.

Once you've answered that question, it's time to pick and choose: whether to use existing technologies or build them in-house, whether the focus should be video or discussion or Digg-like yes-no voting, ad nauseam.

The problem with one of the most visible failures in social-media marketing--the number of brands that rushed headlong into virtual world Second Life two years ago--was that nobody was asking or answering those questions, Sarner said. Companies simply built "virtual headquarters" in the hope that Second Life would gain mass appeal, and then it failed to budge from its status as a niche forum for subculture and futurism.

For some companies, a Second Life campaign would be a good idea if you were distinctly trying to target that segment of the population, Sarner explained, and could use the 3D technology to actually come up with something innovative. He cited the example of electric cars. "If Honda has a new car and it's going to be purely electric, you could've set a Second Life campaign up that's promotional in nature," he said. "The futurism angle of an electric car, it kind of fits the people in that segment."

When asked whether the faltering economy will mean that businesses are cutting back on this largely unproven field of social media for marketing or customer relations, Sarner said he didn't think so, and that many businesses will turn to the Web to stay in touch with consumers during a difficult financial climate. "This is going to be a lifeline," he said. "You don't ruin your customers, and your spirit of customers is probably the only thing you have."

Marketers ought to be aware that some consumers are suspicious about the phenomenon known as "behavioral targeting," a new report from eMarketer says.

Called "Behavioral Targeting Attitudes: The Privacy Issue," the report released Friday explores the digital ad strategy, which collects consumer information and uses it to serve up ads that they may find interesting or relevant. This has been the basis for high-profile programs like Facebook's Social Ads and MySpace's HyperTargeting, as well as Google's extraordinarily successful AdSense. (That's why you'll see ads for vacation homes in Gmail after you've been e-mailing back and forth with your friends about wanting a weekend getaway.)

The takeaway point from the report: "Consumers want ads that are relevant to their needs, but they have mixed feelings about how that relevancy should be determined."

eMarketer cited a TrustE study which found that 70.5 percent of Internet users polled seemed to be decently aware that their browsing activity could be tracked by third parties for advertising. But only about 23 percent of them said that they were OK with having their behavior monitored, even if they were assured that the data would not be shared and no personal information would be divulged.

Targeted advertising is an extremely sensitive subject, with privacy advocates on both the left and right ends of the political spectrum voicing concerns. Internet service providers have been criticized for behavioral-targeting campaigns, questions of legality continue to arise, and top executives at tech companies have been brought into the debate.

The study suggested that advertisers should ensure that consumers are educated on the fine print of behavioral targeting, and that they're offered an opt-in choice. "One way to ensure that consumers welcome rather than reject behaviorally targeted ads is to ask them to give their consent to receive them," a release about the report wrote. "Tell them about the real benefits of saying yes, including more-relevant advertising." That's what the Internet Advertising Bureau has recommended, too.

But perhaps a more serious issue for the ad industry is accuracy. The TrustE numbers cited by eMarketer said that only 12.6 percent of respondents said that more than a quarter of the targeted ads they were delivered were relevant. Ouch.