Nate Hallowell’s

Online Communities and CRM July 30, 2009

When we think of online communities, sites like Facebook, Myspace, and LinkedIn are usually the first to come to mind. Online communities can reach far beyond one specific site, and bridge into other virtual worlds such as online gaming. An online community doesn’t necessarily have specific boundaries. Understand where micro communities like forums and gaming networks overlap and divide is essential to ad networks selling optimized campaigns. Helping a client understand where and how smaller communities group together with larger communities can be extremely difficult but is essential not only to delivering on the initial sell but more importantly on the renewal. Selling a client an ad network package that includes broad RON (run of network) line items gives the network flexibility to re-adjust that campaign. Though a print campaign wouldn’t allow mid run re-adjustment, their online counterparts do. If a campaign is sold strictly on a womens channel containing only womens sites and is running behind goal, countless solutions would be available if the campaign was running through the network. If Oprah brings a Nascar driver on her show (it could happen..) women may flood the Nascar site after the show. In other words – it’s extremely difficult to predict the behavior of Internet users. Effective relationship management for Ad Network clients means constant communication and advice during the run of the campaign. Furthermore – it would be outrageous to expect an ad network to watch every episode of Oprah to figure out where this community might end up online. Networks use re-targeting tools to track users on certain sites. They are then able to re-serve them ads on any site in their network. This allows for more creative retention and returns higher CTR’s.