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whoa! stop! by hansolBy Larry Kilbourne

Several weeks ago I posted a blog entitled Will Yesmail Become NoThankYoumail in Social Networks? that looked at the evolving capability of commercial email marketers to allow recipients to share the offers they receive with their social networks.  My concern was how willing members of social networks are to being marketed to by their friends.

In a recent blog, Will share-to-social work for e-mail marketers?, Heather Palmer Goff of Responsys takes up this question.  She notes that "share-to-social" is really an iteration of the old concept of "forward-to-a-friend."  I should say that it's an iteration writ large, since the sharing is exponentially greater than simply forwarding an email, depending of course on the size of one's social network.

Heather's counsel is to "Make sure before you include share-to-social as an option in any commercial e-mail that the content you're sending is worthy of being shared."

Fair enough, although what constitutes worthy is perhaps the crux of the matter.  She clarifies this in noting that:

"If the message is highly targeted and relevant or is expected to create a buzz among your recipient base, then that message is more share-worthy and could be a candidate for including a share-to-social link."

This sounds unobjectionable, at least in theory.  The question, however, is how realistic or obtainable it is in practice.

Consider the following characteristics of social networks:

1. They can be large.  Until recently Facebook "limited" its friends network to 5,000. (I put quote marks around limits because 5,000 seems a stretch even as a count of people we've ever met.  At least one anthropologist has claimed that the upper range of possible 'friends' given the size of our brain is around 150.)  In fact, I suspect that most of us would admit that our social network of friends is much larger than our network of friends with whom we keep in regular touch.
2. Their makeup can be very diverse. If you put all my Facebook friends in a room together, there's a good chance that if a fight didn't break out, at very least some people would feel insulted or appalled by others I associate with.
3. When friends comment on others postings or send direct messages, this is transmitted by email. One thing social networks certainly do not pose any threat to is email.  When someone responds to something I've posted on Facebook or LinkedIn, I don't need to go to the respective sites to find out, the messages are sitting front and center in my Yahoo email account.

So, given just these three characteristics (there are no doubt additional relevant ones), what are their implications for "share-to-social" commercial email campaigns?

First, let's consider the impact given the size of our social networks. According to Facebook's Cameron Marlow, the current average number of friends an individual has on Facebook is 120.  What happens then, when all - or even half - of those 120 friends begins socially sharing his or her marketing emails?  What I foresee happening is that with the onslaught of social marketing what may have resembled conversations amongst friends at one point will quickly come to resemble an online aggregation of  ads - with the network as the aggregator.

So, size of social networks poses real problems in terms of the likely receptivity by members to widespread disseminating of social marketing emails.

Next, let's turn to the issue of diversity within our social networks.  Assuming that I'm not alone (or even in a minority) in having friends with very divergent political and social viewpoints, how likely is it that Heather's criteria of "highly targeted and relevant" can be met?  My guess is very unlikely. Unless my friends are an extremely homogeneous group, there is virtually nothing (not even jokes) I would share with my entire social network.

In short, diversity within social networks may negate the necessary requirement of relevancy.

Finally, what happens to our email inboxes when my 120 friends (along with me) begin 'sharing' their marketing emails with one another via our social networks.   Well, the one thing of which I'm certain is that the amount of spam that travels unmolested through my filters will grow significantly.

It seems to me that the idea of "share-to-social" misses or ignores the personalization that is increasingly defining how marketers approach lead generation and lead nurturing.  Granted, the marketing email that is targeted to me by a company may be based on the concepts of permission marketing and lead nurturing: it may be very personalized. 

But what happens when I in turn unloose it on my social network? 

I negate the personalization and in the process regress marketing forty years to a time when everything was a sales pitch delivered to a single audience - irrespective of how diverse that audience was.

It seems to me that the central challenge (or incoherence) in trying to extend personalized email marketing campaigns to social networks is how to do so without abandoning the very personalization you are attempting.

Copyright © 2009 by Larry Kilbourne, Ph.D. Dr. Kilbourne is an independent marketing consultant. He may be reached at lkphd@yahoo.com.