This piece from today's NYTimes is pretty typical of the "banners don't work on social networks" story we're seeing a lot of these days. Stories like this reflect the negative sentiment about Facebook and other social sites where "advertising doesn't work". Should be obvious (and not a story anymore) that traditional approaches aren't going to fly in social networks.
By RANDALL STROSS
Web advertising experts see a myriad of difficulties in making brand advertising work on social networking sites.
In this context, the best approach is to get a Toolkit of social solutions into the hands of the right people (namely, agencies and their clients) to tackle the problems and build the winning strategies and solutions. No one has all--or even many--of the answers yet. As an industry and as VivaKi, we collectively need more data, more tests, more collective good thinking to make social successful, repeatable and scalable.
