This tweet from Patrice
Lamothe, this post
from Scobleizer and the discussion around Exec Tweet got me thinking. What if,
instead of pushing commercial companies’ ads, social networks helped commercial
users to increase their share of voice on their platform? Could this “share of
voice” revenue model be the way forward to monetize social networks’ audiences?
What do I
mean by “share of voice”? Social networks in the broad sense of the term are,
in a way or another, tools to promote oneself. Users write on Facebook or
Twitter so that other people hear about them. They want these people to hear
about them because, directly or indirectly, they want to promote themselves. In
other words, it is personal PR in a given media. This is the very basic social
rule of these social products. On the other hand, commercial companies also enter
into traditional PR activities to increase their share of voice to get a
message across.
With this
context in mind, the “share of voice” revenue model is about providing functionalities and
services that help your users increase their share of voice on your social
network.
Let’s take
Twitter as an example. Commercial companies can have an account for free on
Twitter. They are users like any others. They have followers, they sometimes follow
people and they send tweets. Twitter could
sell services or functionalities to help these companies get more followers and
hence increase the share of voice of their tweets. These services or functionalities
can take numerous forms, e.g., “sponsored suggested users to follow” (as is
already the case now when opening an account but I think it’s free). The
pricing could be either a flat fee for the service (as in freemium models) or a
cost per follower type (as in advertising).
On the
other hand of the service, a Twitter user has the choice to follow or not the
commercial user tweets: he decides whether he sees these tweets or no. In this
sense, it is very different from advertising since the latter is “forced” onto
the user. The format of the company’s “voice” is still the tweet hence it is naturally
integrated in the platform. Of course, as always, the social property needs to strike
the right balance to make sure that these "promoted voices" do not overwhelm the product. It should also notify what is promoted or not.
This approach
of “share of voice” can be applied to all sorts of social products since the
basic premise of most social products is personal PR in a way or another.
In an old post,
I said “media channels successful with advertising have a common
characteristic: an excellent fit
between content format, advertising format and user’s purpose/values”. Just replace, in the previous sentence,
the word “advertising” by “monetization tool” and you’ll see that the “share of
voice” revenue model fulfills all these conditions. This means that it should be
more productive than ads on social networks and hence command higher revenue
per user. This also means that the traditional strategic trade-off between user
growth and revenue generation is less stringent because the revenue model fits
with the user experience. However, it probably still means that you need a big audience
for this model to generate significant revenues.
Some will
argue that at the end of the day, it is just another form of advertising model.
Not really: instead of asking “how can I put advertising on my product?”, the
question for the entrepreneur becomes “how can I help some of my users gain
share of voice?”. It’s a very different framing… And, as we all know, the
framing of a problem changes radically the specific solutions that come out.
The “share
of voice” revenue model has a lot of potential for
social networks.Time will tell.
What are your thoughts ?
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