Banners for Buzz?

I recently came across several partnership offers that essentially all boiled down to this idea:

Participant is to mention a particular website in blogs, forums, on Facebook, Twitter, etc. and in exchange the site will display participant’s banner on their site for free.

Now, I’m not going to name these websites. Let’s just say that they were highly relevant to my niche – internet marketing virtual assistant services – and attract a lot of traffic.

So I joined two of these programs just to try them out. I stuck around for a month, dutifully mentioning these sites in my online conversations and commenting on their blogs. I didn’t put a banner up for two reasons – one was that I didn’t have a banner and the other – I didn’t reach the required posting minimum/frequency to qualify for a free banner. In my second month, I sent polite “thanks, but no thanks” e-mails to both sites, removing myself from participating in these programs. Here’s why:

• Neither of the sites had sufficiently high Google PR that backlinks from them would count for much.
• Although both sites did have high visitors traffic, there was no way for me to know whether those visitors were mostly my target audience.
• Both sites had too many links and banners on them already, creating too much visual clutter. Even if my banner would’ve been placed at the top of the page, it would’ve hardly mattered. It would be just one more small banner among 20-30 others.

In short, the potential ROI was too uncertain and in all likelihood, too small compared to the amount of time and effort I was spending on this marketing channel.

But I kept thinking about these two websites. Something seemed a bit off that I couldn’t quite put my finger on… Until today, that is. Today I came across two pieces of information. One came up as I was trying to learn about ad avoidance (as in readers scanning page content, but avoiding looking at banner ads).

“Banners perform worse than print advertisement with regard to recall and brand attitude” (Advertisement Avoidance on Internet)

Another piece came from a social-media blogpost on PR2.0 

Relationships serve as the foundation for everything… and the constant reminder that we’re reaching people, and not audiences… (Social Media is about Sociology, not Technology)

Ok, so neither of these was a big surprise, but combined they really brought the message home. And the message is this:

These types of programs, let’s call them banners for buzz, do not appear to be a good deal at all. While participants generate the buzz, keep conversations going, build personal relationships on behalf of a website and otherwise engage in Web2.0-style marketing, they are paid with something that is decidedly Web1.0 and… has been proven to be ineffective (gasp!).

Technorati Tags: internet marketing virtual assistant services, internet marketing, buzz marketing

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