As more brands explore new approaches to word of mouth marketing in social media, new social marketing services are emerging to help brands connect inside and across social platforms. One such service, SocialVibe, is helping connect people with brands they want to endorse in their social environments. We spoke with SocialVibe President Joe Marchese to learn more about the company and the trends he sees for branded Facebook applications and sponsored Facebook application integrations in 2009.
Can you give us a little background on SocialVibe?
SocialVibe is the result of realizing some time ago there had to be a new way to do advertising if it is going to work on social networks and other social media. “The consumer is in control” has been the catch phrase 
for the 2000’s, but it didn’t seem like anyone was doing anything about it. SocialVibe aimed to change this by building something that was made to benefit brands, consumers and social networks at the same time. We figured if something could make advertising a good thing, or even a fun thing, and put the people in control for real, everyone would be happy with the result. And while SocialVibe keeps evolving, what doesn’t change is that people get the choice and benefit when they interact with SocialVibe.com or a SocialVibe application.
What kinds of campaigns are you doing on Facebook now, and what kinds of partners are you working with?
I know a lot of people have seen the Kraft campaign recently, but any brand sponsorship on SocialVibe.com can be applied to Facebook. SocialVibe simply gives people the choice of what brands they want to “get sponsored” by, and what charity they want to benefit. We want to let people bring their “sponsor” to any place they might publish content. We simply connect brands and people and let them interact. People have something of value for brands, and brands have value to offer to people, SocialVibe just helps the two parties exchange what each has to offer.
How do you see your work on Facebook evolving over 2009?
The current SocialVibe experience isn’t really optimized for Facebook. SocialVibe works with a number of social platforms where displaying your “brand badge” on your social profile is the best way to show your support for a brand. Over 2009 we want to work a lot more with Facebook’s tools to allow people to support brands and cause through their social graph in a more active, rather than just a passive manner. But this will only work if we add value to people’s social interaction.
It seems simple: Q – What makes advertising relevant in social networks? A – Making the advertising social. Q – What makes advertising social? A – Advertising is social when it prompts or facilitates communication. Spamming people with apps isn’t value add for brands, people or the network, so it is not a business model. In 2009 there will be a shakeout as marketers and developers will have to ask if they are delivering value to people and their networks. It is really important to us at SocialVibe that we are always on the right side of that discussion and while we think we have done well, we know that we can do better.
There has been a lot of discussion lately on the pros and cons of building branded Facebook applications compared to integrated sponsorships of or partnerships with existing popular applications. How do you compare these tactical options?
I think both have up side as well as some major flaws. Building brands into apps from the beginning provides a more seamless experience for users, but too often those apps are developed with the thinking that the app will be so cool, or so useful, people will “accidently” share the brand. People are not stupid, they know that they are helping a brand be sharing an app so it’s always better to be up front.
On the other hand, adding brands to popular apps at least guarantees the usefulness of the app, but people liked the app the way it was, so you have to be very careful that you are not pulling a “bait-and-switch” on people. Making money in the short-run is not worth burning the user.
How do you see that discussion evolving over 2009?
I think that the two strategies will both continue. Both strategies can work. I think that adding brands to successful applications might be more successful in the early part of the year given that a lot of brands and marketing agencies are re-tooling and just learning what can make a useful app. But I think branded apps come on strong in the second half of the year as you get the full creative and monetary resources of agencies and marketers behind the goal of developing applications with the user benefit in mind.
The application you delivered to Kraft and Crayon has been well received by the ad community. Why do you think it worked well?
I think that we were very upfront about what the application was. People were sharing Kraft because Kraft was giving back. It was in essence a partnership between Kraft and a community of people. Crayon saw that something like this would be the RIGHT way to get Kraft involved in people’s conversations on Facebook. Finally, we can’t under stimate that over half a million people have come to socialvibe.com and asked us to let them know when there was a brand that fit with what they were looking for (in Kraft’s case, people willing to reach out to their social graphs to help feed people over the holidays). Without those people getting the campaign rolling, this takes a lot longer, and maybe never works. It is that SocialVibe is connected to people, not inventory, that makes campaigns like this get off on the right foot. We could do the same for most any effort, but the brands have to want to engage with, and deliver value to, the community.
At some point it won’t matter how good an application is, people will have a limit to how many apps they truly use. The question isn’t “will people add this application today?”, but rather “will this application be useful to people a month from now?”. If you can honestly answer yes to the second question, you are building something that makes people’s social networking experience better. What it comes down to is will the industry get this part right before people start ignoring all their app requests/notifications.
Thanks Joe. Any final thoughts?
I will steal my final thoughts from SocialVibe’s lead application developer and all around rock star, Aaron Stein. Aaron points out that if you think about the iPhone and Blackberry applications you use, most of the applications you are sent on Facebook you would be upset is someone sent you on your phone – you wouldn’t even think about adding most of them, nevertheless passing them to the contacts you have in your phone. But the applications that make your phone a more useful or fun tool take off. ‘
This same rule should, and will, apply to Facebook as well. Facebook is a communication platform, more like a phone then it is like a blog. Try holding Facebook applications to the iPhone application standard, because sometime soon people on Facebook or Facebook itself might just start holding applications to the standard on their own.
Yesterday at CES, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer 
