Friending is the next advertising

A brilliant article from GigaOm about mixing brands with social networks :

Of course, all this is exceedingly hard to measure and exceedingly easy to brag about — but Marketing Evolution claims adidas directly influenced 1.2 million people to purchase its product and, after those people talked to their friends, influenced 4.2 million more people. Similarly, EA directly influenced 1.8 million consumers and indirectly influenced 4.5 million consumers to say they intended to purchase its products.

That added “C2C” marketing is the power of social networks, says the report. Not that people don’t talk to people about TV commercials, but perhaps that’s even harder to measure.

Yahoo is working on it

Netvibes is working on it

U-lik is working on it too / Aston Martin / Chanel / You Tube