Is the marketing industry’s increasingly imaginative use of social media the best way to recruit new customers – or is it just getting on people’s nerves?

ONE'S LEVEL of social engagement online is a very personal thing. Believe it or not, this journalist still knows quite a few people with no social network profile at all out of either sheer disgust or fears for privacy.

Whether you "like" a friend's holiday snap or the fact that your favourite brand of Irish whiskey has told you to "Enjoy your day", the decision to do so indicates more about your own personality than you might think.

"If I was to be fair I'd say that the motivation behind tagging anything online is to do with the sociability among friends and associates and fans, that social networking induces," says John Fanning, lecturer in marketing and communications at UCD's Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School. "If I was to be honest, I'd say it's ludicrous exhibitionism."

Whatever your motivation, the number of "fans" or "likes" a product or service may have on Facebook or any other social networking service may not give a true representation of its actual popularity.

"I ask my students how many brands do they think they 'like' or are 'fans' of online," says Dr Laurent Muzellec, programme director for the Msc in Digital Marketing at the UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School. "When they check they usually find they are fans of a lot more products and services than they thought they were. They just cannot remember 'liking' them.

"On the flipside, the marketer might think he has 16 million fans. In actual fact, the people who call themselves fans in tagging that brand probably don't even remember doing it. The 'like' button has become meaningless. You can now buy 1,000 fans for your product or service for €150 from a specialised online marketing company."

So, could allowing for more options in terms of user emotion and response to products and services online be of benefit – both for the consumer and the marketer?

"I think it is a good idea," Muzellec says. "The arrival of tools like MySmark really reflects a genuine need on the part of the consumer to express their feelings in a more complex manner as well as the need for brands to understand their consumers better and quicker.

"It's more data, which might also be good in terms of seeing how a particular message is being received by consumers from a campaign," he adds. "Does a new ad correspond with the effect the brand wants to trigger? You might want to trigger surprise but what you're actually triggering is disgust or fear."

Like all market research, though, it can be tricky finding a representative sample of people to volunteer responses to any marketing campaign. Personality differences will affect whether or not any individual is prepared to give up their time to talk about something that isn't very close to them already. It may also be perceived as an infringement of privacy.

"Any apps that you might use that have a Facebook connect option will have a privacy setting through which brands ask consumers whether they can access private information or not," Muzellec says. "I'm always fascinated how so many people don't seem to be concerned about their privacy online. Either they don't realise private information is being accessed or they simply don't care."

User age would be relevant to this also. Younger generations will be more likely to engage in online social media as well as possibly caring less about their own privacy.

"You always wonder who really engages in any questionnaires when it comes to brands," he adds. "Expressing your feelings when a friend posts something is one thing, but when it comes to tagging a brand, it seems to me there's a minority of people who actually 'like' the brand and others with too much free time on their hands."

Despite the integrity of online marketing samples, "tagging", "liking" or "being a fan of" anything online now serves as an extra sales force for any brand.

Fanning says it happens in a variety of ways online. "Anecdotally I have heard of companies, who effectively recruit online 'volunteers' to act as a proselytising force for some brand or another. It's a modern form of 'rent a crowd', I suppose.

"Extending the 'like' and 'dislike' options to users to broader emotionally-based possible answers is potentially a useful tool but it's not a replacement for traditional forms of market research.

"The digital age may continue to throw up alternative forms of information about how people view products or services. But they are simply alternatives rather than substitutes for existing models."

Making their smark: Cloud-based marketing tool allows consumers to choose from a tailored set of emotions or feelings.

B-SMARK is a Dublin-based company run by three Italians who have participated in the UCD Smurfit Graduate Business School MBA mentorship programme. The company has been linked up with mentor Jacques Henry-Bezy, managing director of Bespoke and Beyond Marketing Consultants.

Their main service MySmark – a cloud-based marketing tool which allows consumers to choose from a tailored set of emotions or feelings when responding to the use of a product or service in real time online – is garnering attention in Ireland, the UK, Italy and the US.

They have been invited to the World Summit on Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Boston at the end of this month where MySmark has been selected as one of the top 100 emerging innovations. Not only that but the organisers have decided to use the MySmark tool to gauge sentiment over the course of the three-day event.

B-Smark is to get a €500,000 investment from private venture capitalists before the end of this year and is also receiving continued support from Enterprise Ireland.

So how soon could we see MySmark on our computer screens? “We could start seeing it in the next few weeks,” says company chief executive Nicola Farronato. “We’re presenting at the summit in Boston and then a few days later, we’re attending another conference in San Francisco.

“We’re using the opportunity of the invitation to go on a US road show with the product and we have several interested stakeholders lined up.

“In the US,” Farronato adds, “a small company can scale very fast and scaling up a cloud-based platform is very straightforward anyway. What we’re looking at is finding the right collaboration and the right endorsement.”

Henry-Bezy has given B-Smark some targets to aim for over the next six months to keep the momentum going. “They need to build a community of ‘smarkers’ [online users prepared to be profiled and then called upon by MySmark or volunteer themselves to rate products and services],” he says. At this point, they have several thousand, but they hope for that number to have reached the half a million mark in the next six months.

“MySmark also needs to make sure the product itself is being continuously developed and reaches the stage of becoming a must-have marketing tool for professionals. The search for large potential clients must also continue.”

With so much big news for this small company, it’s hard to imagine what could possibly go wrong. But the world of online marketing, like all other industries where innovation takes centre stage, is cut-throat and no sooner than you start developing and sharing a product do others decide to jump on the band wagon.

“There are always dangers for a company of this size venturing in to a huge, ever-growing sector like digital marketing,” says Henry-Bezy.

“It’s hard to sustain any original business idea. If it is a genuinely original idea, as MySmark is, people will try to emulate you, and there is also the risk that they will better you. But this is a normal business risk, particularly in the innovation space.”

But the real survival of a marketing tool like this depends on its relationship with Facebook. “MySmark is a new product trying to integrate with Facebook’s Open Graph,” says Farronato. “They recently changed the rules for being integrated with them and now all companies need to be in a position to do a lot of maintenance, which leads to extra cost. This is a challenge for us.”

For UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School digital marketing expert Dr Laurent Muzellec, the ideal scenario for a company of this size would be a buy-out.

“Their survival is linked to their ability to get some partnership with Facebook,” Muzellec says, “but if it does become very popular, Facebook could simply develop the same tool. Or they could buy them out, which would be the best solution for them.”