On of the 12:15 sessions at ad:tech was Social Media and Consumer-Generated Media: Has a Value Proposition Emerged? Heidi Browning, SVP of Client Solutions at Fox Interactive gave a wonderful presentation exploring the "Momentum Effect", part of the never ending friending a journey into social networking report. In essence, it is the same old discussion that Elihu Katz covered in his seminal work, "Personal Influence" transposed to the world of Social Media.

Her discussion was focused around a quote from a 27 year old from LA. He said, "I don't want companies to advertise to me. I want them to be my friend." She unpacked this by trying to understand what it means for a company to be a friend. Many people add companies as friends because they want special acces, notice of events, sales, exclusive offers, etc. Others added companies because friends recommended it, something that particularly argues for the idea of personal influence and gets a lot of peoples attention. Some people wanted to associate with the brand as part of their identity creation. Others wanted discounts, and around 11% simply wanted to be friends because they believed in the brand.

As I listened to this, I saw a message on Twitter. Steve Rubel was pointing out that The New York Times now has a Facebook page. I added myself as a fan of The New York Times, for several of the reasons listed above. It will be interesting to see how The New York Times makes use of Facebook. They are typically cited as an example of the old professional generated media company most threatened by social media and consumer generated media.

A later speaker made a wonderful comment about a company that after the success of one social media campaign discovered that "listening to consumers pays off". It is amazing the discoveries that this new media has spawned. I'm sure that this sort of idea never occured to people in before computers. He went on to say that in response to this great discovery, they set up a blog. I could not help but wonder if they allow comments.

The key message was that companies need to be authentic online, that they need to be thinking about long term dialogs with their customers, instead of a brief 30 second interruption as part of a short media campaign.

There are a lot of interesting places to go with this.

(Technorati tag adtech)