Marketing On The Stream: Drawbacks and Benefits

What is the stream?

In short, the stream is social networks and micro-blogging systems like Twitter. It's a collection of environments designed for "live" updating-basically, streaming your life story to the world.

It's generally a world of brief messages, little or no updates and editing, and a general reliance on content "rolling off" after a brief period, never to be seen again.

The stream is growing at an astounding rate. By now, you're either obsessed with following your friends on stream services, or just sick of hearing about them.

One of the greatest recent breakthroughs in the advancement of the stream is that it has become untethered from the desktop PC and web browser. Many major social networking sites offer official or unofficial mobile-phone clients, and some estimates suggest the majority of Twitter usage coming from outside the usual browser. This shift has served both to reinforce the conventions of the stream environment- nobody is writing ten-page blogs on their mobile phones- and to provide an environment where the stream can reach the user even in locations traditional computer-oriented messaging can't.

How does search interact with the stream?

In many cases, they're basically perpendicular. The stream proves to be a fairly difficult problem for conventional search engine marketing to manage, for several key technical reasons.

Stream content tends to be extremely ephemeral. The oldest post on your Facebook wall might be only a few days ago. Such a time limit presents an impassible problem to a search engine spider- if it visits your site once or twice a month, it can't pull together a complete picture.
Stream content is relatively personal and narrow-market. Your friends might be interested that you're going to the flea market on Sunday, but unless you're a celebrity, indexing that information for searchers is likely to be a waste of disc space.
Stream content tends to sit inside "walled gardens". In some cases, the search engines will simply not be able to access the information you've made visible to friends. It's a well-intentioned approach, to keep personal data personal.

Without normal search engine behavior, you simply can't monetize the stream like just another web property. Nobody will pay for a link with a 16-hour expected lifetime, or on a page only visible to twenty close friends.

Instead, it's necessary to turn the search marketing paradigm around. Instead of waiting for customers to search for you, you search for them on their own territory.

In short, stream marketing is about direct customer engagement- finding the right customer and feeding them a well-written response that drives them to your property.

Why isn't it spam? Several reasons.

First, spam tends to be fired from a shotgun- email blast services boast of sending twenty-five million messages when your most attractive prospects number twenty-five hundred. It's cheaper and quicker to keep deluging your widowed Aunt Matilda with "male enhancement" ads than to develop a quality mailing list.

In contrast, practical and implementation limits say that you're not going to send out hundreds of thousands of responses on people's Facebook walls and Twitter pages- so you can't squander your limited message volume on poor prospects.

Second, you don't have to use the shotgun, even when you can. With stream services, you don't just get an address and a name to plug into mail-merge fields- you're getting their recent activity, their profile information, and sometimes their network relationships. You can decide, to a much greater extent, if someone is a valid prospect without bothering them. and all before sending a single message.

How does targeting the stream customer benefit a marketer?

Profile and stream info can be analyzed both explicitly and implicitly. Some users will all but blurt out their life stories in profile fields, but even the "quiet" ones can reveal themselves. If someone is following a software developer, odds are, he uses their products. If they're obsessed with their 401(k) and prostate, you're looking at a 50+ year old male.
Stream communications generally encourage instant responses. It's an environment where the messages are still, generally, directly getting to the visitors, instead of falling into a hundred spam filters. Moreover, you may be able to reach people who otherwise would be out-of-range. People may not be permitted to search for your product at work, but they can recieve a sales message "pushed" to their stream.
A sales message formatted for the stream can be simpler and more basic. Since you're usually just trying to sell a reader on clicking through, in a relatively non-competitive environment, you don't have to write a three-page brochure to explain your product. In many cases, you aren't even allowed to try.unless that brochure has less than 140 characters.
You may be able to reach a customer before they hit a search engine in the first place. Say your car broke down this morning. You might not start searching for a repair shop until after work, but your stream might include "taking the bus today, car won't start" at 8:15 AM. A stream marketer has an eight hour window to get their repair shop in front of you without having to worry about rankings.

However, there are definitely reasons to consider shying away from marketing on the stream.

Demographic concerns. On a high level, stream communication simply doesn't resonate with some user groups. Grandma probably won't be on MySpace any time soon. More specifically, certain networks and services target specific regions and even specific industries. Miss the boat here, and you'll be wasting your efforts.
Ponderable transactions. If you just want someone to go to your website, or perhaps buy a small item, a brief teaser which will be gone in a few hours can make the sale. However, when your business model is based around significant, thought-out decisions, you may not be able to get the purchase immediately just by hijacking a customer's stream. They might look once, but there's the risk they won't come back to make the sale because you were just one of many competing brands they had to consider. Instead, focus on using the stream to build a brand- get the customer to the site, so when they're ready to buy, they'll come back.
Image. Fundamentally, stream communications are informal. It's a world of sharing 'zombie bites' between users and sending virtual booze across the network. For some brands, it's a perfect fit. However, it may not be right if you're an inherently stuffy business- where appearing serious sells. "Yo, check out these TAX ACCOUNTANTS! They rock!" may not be the foundation of a successful marketing campaign.
The ability to target a market. If you get too aggressive in "we'll target anyone who says anything remotely related to our line of work", you'll become a spammer, and get accounts banned as fast as you can create them. You might be tempted to target broadly when there isn't a clear handful of "trigger" concepts. Just because you can use your product for a thousand different markets does not mean they're all a fair target.

Conversely, some products simply lack the "stream volume" to make a useful marketing message. The "trigger" exists, but nobody mentions it in their stream. Simply put, people aren't tweeting 75 times a day "I wish I had some pre-printed bulk-mailing address labels." If you're trapped in a narrow niche, you should consider adjusting your marketing to focus on specific, concrete applications, and monitor the way you put the message out carefully- the further away from your original concept you get, the greater the chance it doesn't really fit the marketing goal.
Credibility. Since stream services are fundamentally about connecting with friends, stream users will have a fairly robust sense for advertising which provides no value for the reader. "We're offering 10% off on the product you've tweeted about wanting" is a much more appealing message than "we sell the product you mentioned in passing."

Where is stream marketing going?

Stream marketing is still in its infancy. Remember web search in 1997? Spotty results, tiny indexes, and complicated tools. We can expect stream marketing to improve in several key ways:

Greater automation. You can't plow through 750,000 tweets issued this hour, but you can give a thumbs-up/thumbs-down to 75 which may be relevant. However, that relies on improving the detection of relevant messages.
Fragmentation. Twitter has become an important market factor, but it could be usurped by a service which better fits the needs of visitors. Not everyone has the same needs in a life-stream service, and eventually, we may see several major players, with just enough differentiation in their offerings to claim a niche.
Targeting the immediacy. While people won't buy a $1,500 printer from an encouraging tweet, they might be willing to enter a sweepstakes giving one out, or request a pamphlet and give-away item. This lets you connect with the "slower-paced" side of the stream user.
Viral marketing. What better place to spread a "hey, check this out RIGHT NOW" message than on a stream? By exploiting your connections with popular stream users, you may be able to get your message circulating directly from user to user. which is the ultimate endorsement.