Social networks - goodbye STP

Seth Godin quotes Gavin Potter about the 21st century being about ’sorting out demand’. “When your messages reach the right people at the right time in the right way, magic happens”, Seth says.

Social networks are changing that. In fact, Facebook and its ilk are obviating the very need for traditional STP (segmentation, targeting, positioning).

Why? Because one, Facebook has made it easy for developers to create applications that run inside of the social network itself. Think the ever-popular Scrabulous. Two, there is a massive swarm of people on Facebook that represent every possible demographic, spanning all sorts of likes, dislikes and tastes. Last, the viral nature of communication makes it easy for information to spread through the network.

This means that marketers can now stop thinking of how to segment and reach out to their audience. Once an application’s been created, simply “drop” it into the network; the swarm will pick it up. The network will figure out the target segment by itself. It’ll definitely reach the segment the marketer had in mind; chances are it’ll also reach several other audiences that the marketer didn’t anticipate.

The flip side is, of course, the utter lack of control. Apart from the application, both positive and negative feedback could spread alarmingly fast too. The latter could prove fatal in the early stages of distribution.

In a sense, this is similar to viral marketing campaigns carried out over email (Yahoo!’s and Hotmail’s campaigns about their own service by tagging on a small line at the end of every message) and other channels. However, back in those days, all a marketer could do was spread a message to “pull” the audience to the advertised service. Today it is the application/service itself that’s being spread.

There’s no Pull, no Push, only Release into the Wild.

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