The truth about social advertising and how to get more for your spending:

It pains me to see how a great idea is being crushed under the weight of unsympathetic brand managers. It is sad when you’ve to cook up feel-good stories when the original idea—if executed right— could produce real, outstanding results.

Key to Social Advertising

Social advertising isn’t for people looking for short-term goals. If the primary focus of your social advertising campaign is your brand, but not the social cause which you pretend to espouse, you shouldn’t expect your advertising money to produce the kind of results that you want. A brand can’t leverage from the social advertising if it fails to bring out the merits of the original idea—which is often the case with brands that solely focus on chasing that magic number.

Social advertising is worth your advertising money if your goal is to build long-term relationships with the people who buy your products. The truth is that social advertising isn’t advertising per se. We should think of social advertising as philanthropy or genuine CSR, and then make our campaign strategies accordingly. We shouldn’t be afraid to project the people who buy our product as the heroes of our social advertising campaign. If they aren’t the real heroes of your campaign, it’s unlikely that your brand would emerge as the winner.