So you want to add a social media component to your marketing plan but you do not have the internal resources or buy-in to fully role one out. If you are in this position then buying social media might be a way to get your feet wet in social media. What is buying social media? Well Jeremiah Owyang had a great blog post on this topic on How Brands Can “Buy” Social Media.
Two of the ideas he brought up were:
Advertisements: Nothing new here, from purchasing Google ads, cutting individual deals with blogs that cover your industry, or going to third party advertising networks like B5, Six Apart, Federated Media, Glam, or any other emerging network such as Technorati Media, launched today.
Sponsorships: Brands seeking longer term marketing gains can sponsor a popular media asset and benefit from association with an affinity. That’s marketing speak for ‘we’re like them, so you should like us’. I’ve seen some sponsorships that make a lot of sense such as Seagate and Scoble (he creates a lot of media, and his community does too, perfect fit for a personal data storage company) or the variety of places GoDaddy has appeared within the web community. Media networks such as Rev 3, Techcrunch networks, and fledgling Fast Company are examples in the tech industry.
The results from sponsorship can be pretty impressive. Lou Ordorica commented that Intel sponsored Digg Labs Arc, which saw 4 million page views in the first 10 days. Since Digg is popular with the tech-savvy, IT-influencer crowd, this was a good job of targeting the right audience through sponsorship.
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