In her recent video post on New Media Minute, Daisy Whitney describes an important emerging trend: rather than renting social media audiences, major advertisers are beginning to buy them.

Renting, in this context, is when the brand sets up its own place on a major social media platform such as Facebook or Hi5. When a brand rents from Facebook, for example, it hopes to get partial access to the audiences that Facebook has, and its ability to customize the audience experience is limited by the existing structure of Facebook. The Facebook fan page of Victoria’s Secret Pink is an example of renting.

Buying, in contrast, is when a brand develops a social media destination (or destinations) all its own. This approach gives the ability to more fully customize the user experience, and develop a long-term relationship with an audience, while increasing their brand engagement over time. Daisy Whitney gives Pepsi’s Refresh Project as an example.

But the term “buy” doesn’t tell the whole story. “Buy” can be further sub-divided into two distinct strategies: “build” and “collect”.

Pepsi’s Refresh Project exemplifies the build strategy. Pepsi built the Refresh Project site, and all its social networking functionalities, from scratch. That’s an expensive and risky proposition. While the Refresh Project may well prove wildly successful, it could also end up like bud.tv.

bud.tv was a marketing venture for the Budweiser brand: a video-rich destination site with robust social networking features to get young men more deeply engaged with the Bud brand. Despite spending millions on building the site and launching it with great fanfare, bud.tv failed to attract a sizeable audience. After more than two years of attempting to increase its popularity, Anheuser-Busch shuttered bud.tv in early 2009.

Why did bud.tv fail? Several theories are offered here, but it’s likely that that the makers of bud.tv had an “if you build it, they will come” mentality. After all, with a great brand, compelling video content and cool ways for audiences to interact, why wouldn’t they come? Except that they didn’t come.

For brands that prefer not to take the risk of building a social media destination from scratch, there is another way to form a direct, long-term, deeply-engaging relationship with a social media audience: by using the “collect” strategy. Instead of building with the hope that they will come, why not collect the places where they already are? General Mills provides an example. With Platefull, General Mills has assembled a collection of high-quality sites and blogs where their target audience already dwells. The sites and blogs remain independent, and simply continue doing what they do best: facilitating interaction among cooking enthusiasts and food lovers. As the Platefull community thrives, General Mills increases engagement by, for example, sharing a recipe for Bisquick banana pancakes with their audience. Because General Mills has formed collaborative, mutually-beneficial agreements with the Platefull sites and blogs, General Mills has the ability to create super-rich, highly-customized brand experiences for their audiences.

The possibilities for audience/publisher/brand social interaction within these collections of sites are endless.  Imagine an auto brand syndicating a Twitter widget across its collection of sites, combining tweets from site publishers and visitors as they attend a launch event for the brand’s new sedan model. Or consider how all publishers in a clothing brand’s collection could systematically filter back what they are hearing from their audiences on emerging fashions, using a messaging application. Or suppose that the high frequency of the phrase “my two-year-old” in a user’s posts on several sites within a CPG brand’s collection is leveraged to serve video ads to that user, featuring training pants instead of diapers.

So, when in shaping its social media strategy a brand decides to buy instead of rent, its next decision is whether to build or collect. Collecting has clear advantages over building – there is no risk of investing in a flop, because the sites being collected are already popular with the brand’s target audience. Further, from the audience’s perspective, the collected sites are authentic – they weren’t built primarily for a marketing purpose. In fact, authenticity may be the key success driver for social media. Perhaps, indeed, it was its lack of authenticity that caused bud.tv to fail.

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