'Fishing Where the Fish Are' Requires Studying the Pond

Nate Elliott | November 20, 2007, 11:06 AM

Brian Morrissey recently published a story in AdWeek asking whether sponsored pages on social networking sites are killing campaign microsites. In it, Carol Kruse from Coca-Cola says she's launching her new Sprite promotional page (designed to target young consumers) as a social networking page rather than as a standalone microsite because "we really believe in fishing where the fish are."

Fair enough -- Sprite can find quite a lot of its target audience on MySpace and Facebook and Bebo. But it's vital that each brand determine for itself where it's most likely to find its audience -- because not all the 'fish' are on social networking sites. In fact, as we revealed in our recent Social Marketing in Europe report, social networking sites aren't a very good place at all to reach most Europeans.

While almost one-third of 15- to 24-year-old Europeans say they regularly visit social networking sites -- nothing to sniff at -- almost 40 percent regularly visit product information sites (such as campaign microsites). Of course, even though product sites get more usage from this demograhpic, social networks aggregate users better -- there are only a handful of social networking sites that get most of that usage, while usage of campaign microsites is spread across thousands of different products. So I do recommend that Sprite (and other brands with a strong focus on younger demographics) experiment with converting their microsites into social networking pages.

But outside social networks' core demographic, this decision starts to get more difficult. What if you're targeting 25- to 34-year-olds in Europe? Nearly one-half of these users visit product sites regularly, but less than 15 percent of them regularly visit social networking sites. Does it make sense for advertisers chasing these consumers to start hosting all their microsites on social networks? What about 35- to 44-year-olds, for whom the differences in usage skew even more heavily?

Fishing where the fish are is a wonderful concept, and I think Carol's probably got it right for promoting Sprite. But advertisers need to use this concept as the jumping-off point for some deeper research into their target audience, rather than just as a justification for blindly launching social networking pages. This medium, as popular and hyped as it is, can only effectively reach one age group in Europe today: 15- to 24-year-olds. If you're an advertiser targeting any other age group, you're probably going to have to fish elsewhere.