Social networking and advertising (again)

I have commented before that advertising revenues on social networking sites seems to be challenging. I came across a couple of new articles that reinforce the same message. This is starting to sound like old news!

Here's an article covering some research from ExactTarget and Ball State University's Center for Media Design. If you follow the links at the bottom of the article, you can download the complete research report. The bottom line is that email marketing seems to be more effective than placing advertisements on social networking sites.

While there has been a rise in the number of people using review websites before major purchases, the value in these reviews is that they are independent - most of the time, from complete strangers. This doesn't seem to be the place for advertisements - it is more about personal communication. If this carries on, it is going to be difficult to provide ROI for Social Networking sites. In the current trading conditions, this could cause some difficulty for site owners, advertisers and their investors.

The second article provides some interesting insights into the usage of Internet TV sites, particularly by men. I love statistics and this article provides some interesting insights.

And while we are on the subject of interesting articles, this article provides some thought provoking material on where folks have gone "slightly less than optimally" with social networking deployments.