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Is American Apparel Getting its Money’s Worth with Social Network Advertising?August 5th, 2008 at 1:31 pmSource:Mashable! Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. STARTUP DETAILS: Company Name: Smynx 20 word description: Find new ideas for having fun, and arrange to try them with friends and people near you. CEO’s Pitch: Smynx is a website for people who need more variety in their lives. Get inspiration for active, worthwhile, or just unusual new ideas to try and things to do. You can also arrange to try them, either privately between friends, or publicly with new people, making friends in the process. And if you have a good idea, add your own! In keeping with the idea of having more fun in your life, you can rate ideas by interestingness, comment and tag them, and even add your own little sketches! Mashable’s Take: If you have friends in driving distance and the lot of you can’t think of anything to do, Smynx may be just the thing for you. This site lets you post and search for activity ideas you can do with your friends. Some of them you can even do by yourself, such as watch all the episodes of a season (or 3) of your favorite television series in one night, but the purpose of Smynx is to help you find activities on a local level. Any ideas that are public and are in your neck of the woods will appear as recommendations for things you may want to do yourself. Any ideas that you’d like to try out through the site involve some basic event-planning tools that let you pick a time and date, and post the event on Smynx’s site. This event-planning process could be greatly expanded to include import and export options so you can post the event on your Facebook events profile, import friends from email or various social networks, or sync up local events with your iCal. This would also be a prime area for any additional event-planning resources or further details surrounding a particular idea, which could be used for marketing or advertising purposes or for recommendations for products that are related to the idea being tried out. For instance, in planning my dog party, I could receive recommendations on pet treats and party favors for the willing pet owners. In posting or viewing others’ ideas, you can rate them, or even add a sketch (think the graffiti app), which is fun and helpful for search and filtering purposes, but uploading your own image or even performing a Web search for importing a Flickr image may have a broader appeal to users as opposed to the sketch option. While ideas are currently broken down into categories like “social” and “active” I think Smynx has the potential to dig deeper into various niche groups, such as dating ideas, children’s parties ideas, or even housewarmings or weddings. Sponsored by Sun Startup Essentials
Companies from all over the globe are making their way to the Web to try their hand at online advertising. And according to the latest comScore report, American Apparel leads the pack, delivering 483 million display ad views in April, reaching 49 million Internet users an average of 9.9 times during the month. And while it easily outpaced the second place firm, UnderArmour, I can’t help but wonder if American Apparel should run for the hills and hope against hope that things can turn around. For all the money it spent on advertising online, the company’s profit slumped to just over $1 million in the last quarter, $11 million less than the previous quarter. Granted, those quarters didn’t include the advertising the company spent during April, but American Apparel has consistently had an online presence in advertising and seemingly, to no avail. Some will say that the economy may be causing the downturn in American Apparel’s revenue, but I think it may go far beyond that. Let’s face it – if you’re spending that much money online in an attempt to bring more people to your site and buy clothing, wouldn’t you hope that it actually bears some real progress? But the story doesn’t quite end there. According to comScore, most of these ads were displayed on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and others. Does this say something about advertising on social networks? Social networking users are notoriously fickle and usually interact with the services for as long as their “cool” or until they’ve grown out of them. And although there is little evidence to prove the point, I’m wondering if social networking users also couldn’t care less about advertising and vendors would do better to spend money on more traditional sites where viability of advertising is easier to measure. At this point, this is all conjecture and American Apparel’s poor performance may be the result of other factors that have nothing to do with social networks. But it begs an important question: Should companies be advertising on social networks to target young adults? I’m starting to think they shouldn’t. Should companies be advertising on social networks to target young adults? ( surveys) —Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:American Airlines Sues Google for Selling AdWordsStagr - Killer Custom T-Shirt ServiceReminder: Design a T-Shirt and Win an iPhoneAmerican Greetings Nabs PhotoWorks for $26.5MCBS and Dogster.com Partner for Summer TV SeriesTakkle Launches America’s Best Branded GroupGlam Media Steals Executive Talent from MySpace
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