Dispelling the "free advertising" myth

This New York Times story on "free advertising" has my irritation levels set on maximum. That's because it's centered around one of the most persistent - and wrong - myths about social media and word of mouth marketing: That it's free.

It's this particular paragraph that I'm going to take issue with:

What does free advertising look like? It can take many forms: Getting a journalist or blogger to review a new mobile phone, placing a video on YouTube, spreading the word via bloggers, and starting a Facebook group dedicated to a brand or product.

All of those cost money.

Getting a journalist or blogger to review a product is not just something you come into work and throw together before you begin your real work. It's (or at least it should be) part of a larger campaign strategy for which goals and benchmarks have been clearly defined. Having worked on more than one product review campaign involving bloggers I can tell you to do them right they're both time and resource intensive.

Placing a video on YouTube is free, yes, but if the brand wants a slick branded channel that's going to cost some dollars in terms of design work. It's also not exactly as simple as upload and let it go. Someone needs to be in charge of managing the tags and keywords on the video and tracking its spread. With the millions of YouTube videos it also helps to do a little outreach to interested bloggers and writers with the link to the video to help spread the word and that costs money.

Which gets me to the "spread the word via bloggers." Not free. It's media relations, which companies have always paid for from their agencies and always will. If you pay an agency $500 for media outreach and that results in 20 mentions *from the people they contact* that comes to $25 per mention, but that billed time also should include vetting a media list and doing their research on the bloggers they're going to be contacting. If, as a result of those 20 initial hits, 10 other bloggers pick up the story the client's costs drop to about $17 per mention. But that's not free.

Finally, starting a Facebook group for the brand or product is, once again, not free. You can't just expect the page will automatically start attracting hundreds of fans that are just waiting for the brand to show up. Agencies need to research if there are existing fan-created pages and talk to them, they need to do outreach around the page and might even recommend doing some advertising to promote the page and drive membership. Plus, since this should be part of that larger online strategy, it's not great thinking to break this out from the overall cost of that campaign.

One of the great things about social media is that the tools that make up that category are indeed free or at least relatively low cost. But while the tools aren't going to cost very much out of pocket the implementation of those tools and the strategy around their usage does and always will. If you're doing it yourself and not using an agency or consultant it's still going to cost something, even if that's just your time and resources.

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