Marketing Spend on Communities Increase

Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester wrote about a really interesting chart in Avenue A/Razorfish’s 2008 Digital Outlook Report in his blog today (by the way, if you touch the social media industry in any way you should be a regular reader). Avenue A/Razorfish lays out their billings by vertical from 2004-2007 in the chart below. The steepest curve from 2006 – 2007 is Community followed by Entertainment. As Jeremiah notes, ““Community” shot up 34 million to 55 million an increase of 61%. If you look at that trajectory it was the fastest growing billing for their firm in the last 4 years.”

What’s most interesting about this is that we’re only just beginning to see the value of social media from a marketing perspective and the industry is just starting to crack the nut of concepts like targeting. It’s probably safe to say that this curve is going to continue heading up in that direction through this year and over the next few as business models mature.

David Deal (marketing director at Avenue A/Razorfish) raises another interesting point in his blog. David talks about his colleague Brandon Geary’s research detailed on pages 49-55 of the report, “Conversations with the Connected Class.” Geary’s team conducted “in-depth interviews with 25 people between the ages of 18 and 34 who exhibit a high propensity for using a variety of digital platforms.” David writes that, “The connected class also views different social media sites as opportunities to meet new people among multiple cultures and scenes…We believe the industry will see the proliferation of even more specialized, sophisticated social networks that cater to the varied identities and roles of the connected class. Consequently, marketers need to plan on participating in even more social media networks and customize our approaches for each speciality.”

We couldn’t agree more. At its core, KickApps is all about enabling publishers to create venues for people to express themselves, meet like minded people and discover new content of interest. If you step back and think about it, social media is all about enabling those age old HUMAN behaviors. The internet and technology, from message boards to social networks to UGC sites, has merely replaced (or supplemented) the neighborhood park, pub, post office, corner store, etc. To argue that one site or one social network is all that people will ever need is about as naive as saying that people will only ever need to read one newspaper, shop at one store, and eat porridge everyday.

For our part, we’ve simply created a way for people/publishers to be able to very easily create and run their own social media sites that facilitate these behaviors. We naturally believe that our focus on innovation, quality of service and a business model that makes sense, is the right one. During a review of our weekly stats today, all signs point to that. We’re now powering well over 15,000 sites, driving over a quarter billion page views a month with over 11 million uniques a month. Thanks for being human .