Web advertising has taken many shapes and forms over the years. We propose “Relationship Ads” maybe the next carton of fairy dust in many failed attempts. Or will it? To date, the most successful form of advertising on the Web has been banner and text ads tied directly to keyword searches. Now Social Media has replaced old fashioned surfing, browsing, auctioning and portal sites. Social Media is about connecting and conversing, yet advertising agencies and business are still looking for one-way marketing solutions on a two-way street.

The current eye is on two companies for Social Media advertising solutions; 33Across and Social Media Networks. 33Across is unveiling what it calls “Friendship Ranks”, a take on Page Rank in search engine marketing - and Social Media Networks has a patent pending on FriendRank; oh dear. The entire premise of these solutions rests on an age-old marketing premise; Market Mavens as it was originally termed. Now advertisers call them “Influencers”. These are the people who recommend products and services to friends. A lot. They can help virally spread everything from a cool/funny video to a product or service. 33Across and Social Media Networks claim to have some secret mojo that studies relationships inside Social Media networks like Bebo or Facebook, then tie in advertising. The engine turns you and your friends into automated “recommenders” of whatever is being promoted.

Advertising on Social Media networks like MySpace and Facebook or Ubu are desired because of the potential reach. But no one has really had any great success. The market segment is only 2% of US online advertising and less than 1% in Europe and the UK. Research firm eMarketer even downgraded ad spend in MySpace due to poort results.

Then there’s privacy concerns. Let’s not forget how miserably Beacon failed for Facebook trying to leverage user behaviours. Essentially, these new social media advertising apps are looking at you and your friends, developing assumptions and delivering up advertising the system thinks is relevent. Perhaps it is, but will people respond?

Our suspicion is that such intrusive advertising may just be another tool to confuse markers and will likely only attract big budget companies. What I think is missing in this case is that people make recommendations about products and services for one reason - because they want to. It is something they like to do and feel good about because they think they’re bringing something useful or good to a friend. An automated system only interprets an action, but does not understand the context.

Social Media is about context. It’s not just behaviours, and any behaviour has context around it, since it is a conversant application, it’s two-way. When a company is advertising it is a one-way activity. The entire process, even when you might be able to build your dream car, is guided and not free flowing. This is where I think the deeper issue of success will lie for companies like 33Across. It will be interesting to see how these new technologies play out. For now, we won’t recommend a spend to our clients.