Marketing Experiments.com reports on an experiment they conducted to compare the Return On Investment (measured in cost per unique visitor) of a 12-month Social Media Marketing Campaign against a 30 day Google Adwords Campaign. The report begins with background theory on the power of social networks as  communication channels. Metcalfe's Law "states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system (n2)." The network grows exponentially with the number of people in the network, and thus the faster information spreads. Social Media Optimization is described as maximizing the number of people who see your content and tell someone else about it. The Experiment involved marketing 4 websites: HollywoodSquared.com, a site to promote struggling artists; i58projects.org, a non-profit charity site; SweatbandMan.com, a comedy site; and 2008PresidentialPoll.com, a simple online political polling site. Over a 12 month period, an employee worked 360 hours, at $10 per hour, blogging, creating content, and engaging in social networks to drive traffic to the four websites. This activity yielded over 93,000 unique visits. A 30-day test of Google Adwords, bidding up to 75¢ per click on selected keywords, resulted in 2,047 visits. By dividing the cost of each campaign by the resulting number of visits, the author calculates that the Social Media campaign cost 4¢ per visit ($3600/93,207), while the Adwords campaign cost much more: 61¢ per visit ($1250/2,057).

While praising the low-cost effectiveness of the SMO campaign in driving traffic, the author acknowledges how much easier the Adwords campaign was: a few clicks vs 12 months of blogging, creating content, and networking. The SMO campaign also proved riskier, as it sometimes caused an image-damaging disruption to the communities they sought to join. The article concludes with 6 "basic steps" for creating a Social Media Marketing campaign:

1) pick a theme related to your content that is already being actively discussed online.

2) engage in social media as a person, not a corporation

3) develop targeted content. consider hiring someone from your target audience to do this for you

4) use a platform that already has the networking tools you need built-in, such as Wordpress, Blogger, or Movable Type.

5) "prime the community" by finding out what people are already talking about online, and then join the conversation, and begin adding your own content.

6) make a long term commitment to be actively engaged in the community.