Marcien Jenckes, senior VP at AOL
Marcien Jenckes, AOL's senior vice president of messaging and social media, says there's more to social networking than most marketers realize -- including instant messaging.
Transcript: Marcien Jenckes, senior VP at AOL
I think user-generated content is probably under appreciated in that I don't think people define it broadly enough. An example is that every single day on AIM, our messaging service, people send 90 million away messages. All that is user generated content. It's other people projecting they're status, letting other people know what they're up to, and that's the type of thing that doesn't even enter these kinds of conversations but shows how powerful it can be.
There are four big battle grounds of the types of services that consumers use. One of them is around the concept of identity. And you actually see a lot of user-generated content and a lot of viral content around people creating an identity for themselves or the people that they care about.
The second is the concept of status, and I talked a little bit about that before -- and people projecting things about themselves, letting other people know how they want to be seen. And there are lots of examples about advertisers creating things that consumers can associate with their identity or status to talk to third parties.
The third is this concept of building your network, and increasingly, advertisers are creating forums for people to connect with other people with similar interests. You see a lot of this, for example, health circles. Your pharmaceutical companies creating communities around specific treatments or specific program that are useful to consumers.
And the final piece is really around communication, and this is one the things that has me the most excited. I see advertisers are actually inserting themselves into how people communicate with each other. Not in a way that gives people tools to do interesting things. So think about the concept of a video away message, or think about the concept of rich expression that allows you to communicate with third parties and associate yourself with a particular advertising brand or something that you think is cool like a movie or a kind of sports shoes.
As long as you are mindful of one thing, which is consumers control their communities. The communities belong to the consumer, not to the publishers, not to the advertisers, but as long as you keep that in mind, there are opportunities for the publisher to create forms to connect with he consumers and monetize it. There are lots of these examples, like we've seen in this conference.