Real Fresh TV | Specialists in Social Commerce and Social Media Marketing

Marketing on social networks is less about Social Ad(vertising) and more about Engagement Marketing.

The former, a word play on ‘Social Ads’, is about targeting marketing messages to users on Facebook through the news feeds of their friends.

Engagement marketing, on the other hand, is about engaging a user with brand/marketing experiences that makes such an impression that they willingly share it with their friends.

This approach has been used successfully by global sports and fashion brands on the ‘other two’ social networks, Bebo and MySpace.

This post is a follow up to Saturday’s open letter to Facebook in which I suggested they considered introducing a monthly subscription option that offered users averse to sending and receiving Social Ads a way to opt out.

Disclosure: Real Fresh TV works with a number of online publishers to provide content owners a one stop digital distribution service for publishing multimedia content online. Our publisher partners include YouTube, Bebo, Brightcove, Veoh and Azureus.

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This is the response my open letter to Facebook suggesting they implement a monthly paid subscription for those adverse to receiving Social Ads is currently receiving on Mathew Ingram’s widely read blog.

Matthew Ingram is a technology writer for Toronto’s The Globe and Mail.

The first commenter, Brian Sullivan says:

“So this would imply that Facebook is so compelling that users would pay to use it? Is that really the case? …. Maybe I am a Luddite or just an old fart but I think both ideas are ludicrous.”

Here’s the rest of his comment.

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This is an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook and the rest of the Facebook team.

First, I have to say I’ve nothing but admiration for the way you have laid the foundations for a whole new way of connecting with people online.

Facebook is so appealing because it effortlessly allows me to communicate with people I know in real life by recreating a fairly accurate virtual representation of my connection(s) with them.

I’m hardly a power user, as you can probably tell. As founder of a self-funded UK startup, I haven’t a great deal of time to spend on Facebook each day but I enjoy what I use of the service.

The status updates of far flung friends are a joy to receive and news feed niceties about how someone’s day is going are… fantastic.

All that real-time feedback, genuine and personal as it often is, is awesome and makes my time on the site worthwhile.

All the same, as a start up founder myself; I understand the very real pressure to generate revenues you are now under.

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Facebook’s stratospheric growth since Mark Zuckerberg’s launch of the F8 platform in May has shown the potential of social networks as development platforms.

Google’s launch of OpenSocial early this week proves that the big guns are watching this space very closely indeed.

What happened to the web as a platform? Where is all this leading?

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We will be covering a number of social media related events in coming months, using our Events category as a platform for discussing notable events and conferences and sharing lessons learnt.

Stay tuned.

So the Real Fresh TV site is pretty much ready now to be unveiled now. Look out for our public launch some time next week. Till then we’ll be polishing the silverware and crafting incise commentary. Look out for more blog posts…

We’ve tweaked and tweaked and even changed web host to bring you a much improved site at realfresh.tv. And we are rightly proud of how good it looks.

Sincere apologies to all who got the dreaded Internal Server Error 500 page on visiting the site over the last few days. Hopefully, that’s all behind us now.

For all those yearning for the big video player that used to live on the home page, have no fear, you’ll still be able to watch our groovy content here. Check out the ‘Watch’ Page…

You’ll shortly be able to leave comments after videos, finally. The Video Upload page will also be up soon. More video changes on the way…

You will also be able to vote in polls and suchlike. Get involved. Tell us what you think.

Over the next few days I will be sharing why we’ve re-launched and where we are up to with our multi-platform content distribution plans.

It’s all very exciting!

In breaking news, Microsoft has out bid Google to buy a stake in Facebook.

Initial reaction at Real Fresh HQ:

Poor Google.

Oh well. In the words of Aristotle:
“One swallow does not make a summer…”

Microsoft set out to prove that it has a strategy for catching up with Google in the online advertising wars and has proven this by spending more than Google was prepared to spend on Facebook. (more…)