Fizwoz Blog

From the birth of the internet, pornography was rated the single most popular activity on the world-wide web, making millions for companies that took it mainstream. But now there is a new phenomenon heating up the web. In a span of less than four years, social media has overtaken porn as the number one activity on-line. And this dramatic shift is shaking the very foundations of the media industry, causing an epic change in how marketers pitch to consumers.

Think about this. It took the medium of radio 38 years to reach an audience of 50-million listeners. Television took 13 years to reach that many viewers and the internet reached its user base of 50 million in just 4 years. But 200 million of us signed up for the social media site Facebook in less than a year. That is an audience so huge even politicians are taking note, and getting in on the social media action.

Just last month, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev used Twitter, not television or newspapers, to get out his message to world leaders at the G-8 summit. On his Twitter account he gave information to the world using brief words and pictures that he snapped himself. President Medvedev now has 26,000 followers on Twitter and counting.

Social Media is indeed changing the way we communicate so dramatically that corporate America is beginning to understand how it can help the bottom line. Already we see companies from Wall Street to Main Street asking their customers to share their pitches with friends and family via facebook, twitter and MySpace. And this business phenomenon is growing virally, allowing companies and organizations to grow their own social networks and expand their brand awareness.

Want some proof? Just check out the bottom of web pages from CBS or Lufthansa. They offer links that encourage you to share their news and information with your friends on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and MySpace. Doctors are using social media to connect with patients, and food vendors are using twitter to tell customers where their food trucks will be by the hour.

Chase is using Facebook to promote its Chase Community Giving campaign to help give $5 million dollars in donations to favorite charities. People vote and then encourage their friends to vote via Facebook. Almost three million people have signed up so far. People use their social network to win, and Chase looks like an altruistic corporate citizen at a time when financial institutions need all the PR they can get.

Online women’s apparel retailer ModCloth just secured a $19 million round of financing to support its plans to “democratize” fashion by using social media to blur the lines between retailers, customers and designers. The company lets its customers decide what styles and designs are produced and sold by allowing them to vote for and comment on designs. Those with enough votes get produced, cutting the inherent risk in taking new clothing to market.

It is viral marketing through voting on the social media platform. The word goes out to their 21,000 twitter followers and 58,000 Facebook fans. People can submit names for a “Name It and Win It” contest that keeps customers engaged. I call that smart “social commerce”, using their engaged Facebook base. And my own experience proves viral campaigns do indeed work when implementing a social commerce platform.

San Francisco based start up fizwoz, where I serve as Chairman, is combining a common consumer activity, entering photo contests, with a crowd-sourced voting mechanism. Called “SocialEyes”, the service is designed to provide companies the platform to encourage active participation among their social media audiences by combining a photo and video contest with social sharing tools. Contestants submit their images to a contest via the widely available fizwoz mobile phone application. When entries are approved, contestants are encouraged to get their social network to vote for their entry. The mobile application verifies that all submissions are original and owned by the contestant, a common problem for many photo and video contests.

The most successful campaigns employ an opted-in, highly-targeted, email marketing database. Here’s how the numbers can work, assuming an email database of 100,000 recipients and using standard response statistics. 25% will open the email, 5,000 will click on the contest, and 25% of these people will submit an entry in the photo and video contest and then invite 12 of their friends to vote for them.

This means that 15,000 additional people will get an invite from a friend to vote, bringing more traffic to the contest site. Experience shows that 15% of these people will decide to participate themselves and invite 12 of their friends to vote for them. Now 27,000 more folks will get a personal invite to vote, which means that we now have 42,000 extra people who have virally seen the contest and many will have engaged with the brand.

And so the viral marketing cycle continues. And if the reward or prize is compelling enough, participants will be more aggressive in getting their friends to vote for them.

Consider this: if Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s third largest. So why wouldn’t companies maximize their social media contacts on such social media platforms? And it can be a lot cheaper than producing and airing a major TV ad campaign.

BRIAN BANMILLER

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