Brands and Social Networking

How consumers create the 'momentum effect.'

By Ava Seave
11/17/2008 -11:13 PM

I attended the CMO Summit run by the Columbia Business School Center on Global Brand Leadership in mid-October. It was different than the usual talking heads, as part of every presentation there were peer-to-peer discussions and interactive exercises with different groups of attendees—so you didn’t sit in the dark, you had to pay attention and you got to speak to a lot of very smart people.

Of the speakers, Heidi Browning, a Sr. VP from MySpace was particularly interesting on the subject of brands and their effectiveness on social networking sights. She stressed that the impact of a brand presence on a social networking site really comes from a consumer using the brand as a reference point in a personal profile and then passes the info along to a friend. They call this the “momentum effect.”

She also directed us to a study that is worth looking at. The study, although obviously self serving, does have some pretty good stats, including differentiating between the under 40 year old social networking crowd versus the non-SN crowd in the time spent reading magazines for pleasure. Both groups rank it higher than video games, but lower than cell phones. But SN users spend 16 percent less time with magazines than non-SN users.

Ava Seave is a Principal of Quantum Media, a strategy and marketing consulting group.