Thursday, July 17, 2008

Risks Meebo has with Social Media


Meebo is an IM program that supports systems such as Google Talk and AIM. Meebo is trying a new concept to make more money and they are trying to use social media to do it.

Their Social Media Advantages

I saw this on Adweek, so I think this is true. Meebo has tested out their plan to use pop-up ads during chats in Google Talk, AIM and others. Advertisers want this ad space to join in a conversation with their consumers, that's one good thing. The other is that the test markets Meebo used saw a one percent interaction rate with these ads, which is pretty good. Another good thing is that advertisers only have to pay per click. Good for advertisers?


Why This Strategy Will Fail


First of all, Meebo plans to interrupt chats about every three minutes with ads. That is just going to be annoying. People will not like being invaded upon like this. That is not the main reason why this will fail. The main reason is that these companies selling these ads are looking for conversations. The only way this is going to happen is if a social media specialist is waiting to talk to every reply. Consumers have a large chance of being ignored due to the small time the company has to respond to a single chat, the SM specialist has to be right on time and most companies do not have that man power. This will cause a severe problem. Willing consumers who actually respond and are interested will be ignored, leading to potential fans of your company transforming into enemies. This is where negative word of mouth will spread rapidly. Overall, the companies paying for these clicks will be paying to create angry customers. If you have enough social media specialists than it could work, but we all know that is not the case. I tried to warn you.

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