Let me start by saying that I am not sure whether this is a good idea or a bad one. I've been thinking about it for some time, there are pros and there are cons. Social Network Advertising is advertising that is communicated to you personally by members of your social network, rather than through broadcast or other common advertising outlets. I use the term "social network" loosely here - it doesn't necessarily mean one of the new social networking web sites, it could just be a group of friends communicating via email or other medium. Think of it a different spin on so-called "viral marketing", a self-organizing advertising network.
Here an example of how this might work. A advertiser sends an advertising to a small group of people who have agreed to receive such ads. The recipients of the advertisment would then read the ad and forward it only to friends that they genuinely believe would be interested in the products or services described. Then those friends would forward it to their friends, and so on. A method would be necessary to compensate people for their participation in the network.
Of course, two thoughts immediately come to mind: email chain letters and spam. I get enough spam already, let alone from my friends! But wait a minute, my friends are not evil spammers, are they? If they are really my friends, then they would only send me ads that I might be interested in. Otherwise, it would certainly hurt their reputation. A reputation system would be an inherent part of such a network - whether it be one measured subjectively by members receiving ads or objectively via a ratings-type system (or both). This could drastically improve the response rate of an advertising campaign. If I am willing to put my reputation at stake to send you an advertisment, I'd better be damn sure that you would be interested. The result, theoretically, is that you would only receive ads that are highly targeted to my interests, as judged by people who know me best, whom I trust. Given a choice between mass broadcast spam and social network advertising, I would choose the latter.
It's hard not to think about this idea without thinking about email. But it doesn't have to happen via email. For example, blogs might act as the form of advertising communication. The readers of my blog would be recipients of the advertisment. While I might not know most of them personally, the fact that they have decided to read my blog provides some information about what types of advertising they might be interested in. Once again, posting a social networking ad to my blog would be putting my reputation on the line. If readers feel like they are reading spam, they won't be readers much longer (and they may not have nice things to say/write/blog about me either).
The more I think about this, the more I keep returning to the same question: is this a viable advertising method or just spam from your friends? Perhaps an experiment would be a way to help answer this question.
The inspiration for this line of thinking came from a sentence from The Cluetrain Manifesto, (paraphrasing) every single advertising message that we see is one that we didn't ask to receive.
