There are still no clear best practices for applying social networks to marketing or media strategy in general, according to Andrew Frank, vice president of research, Gartner.

Published: 02 Sep 2008

There are still no clear best practices for applying social networks to marketing or media strategy in general, according to Andrew Frank, vice president of research, Gartner.

In an interview with eMarketer, Frank said there is an overall sense of disillusionment with the Interactive Advertising Bureau standard banner approach to monetising social networks, or utilising social networks as an advertiser.

He added that one of the problems with advertising on social media is there's so much going on in the average page that it's hard to get noticed. "Video and other sorts of rich formats address that. They also tend to be more viral, at least on some social networks—all social networks are not the same in regards to the virality of content," Frank said.

"Marketers have to realise that the influence of social networks goes far beyond hard-core users. Marketers also need to lose the idea that they have to give up control of brands on the Internet because social media users will do whatever they want with it. It's true that you have less control. But this mantra about giving up control is highly misleading and can actually result in something unintentional," shared Frank, who complimented Dell as one of the prime examples of a company that had some problems that erupted on the social media sites. "They have now really put both the offensive and defensive use of social media at the center of their marketing strategy," he said.