This is Part III in my dissection of RazorFish’s 2009 “Social Influence Marketing” (SIM) survey.

Building it doesn’t mean they will come. Sure, your Facebook Page is a great opportunity to promote current sales incentives, but you’ll first need to have Fans to receive it.

Creating a presence as a method to promote a product requires that the presence itself also be promoted. If you are looking to promote something, while leveraging the power of social, consider social advertising.

A claim to fame for social ads are the power to drive action. RazorFish gives the example of “entering a photo contest by uploading a photo directly into an ad unit.” In this example @brass612 and @shivsingh point out, “A photo uploaded could be viewed at the contest’s website, along with other entries made by contestants all over the web. In this way, social ads power the contest versus relying on the contest website to generate traffic for its success.”

We are trained to ignore traditional online ads and we’ve become crazy good at it. In the image below, David Armano illustrates that most online display ads are automatically skipped over or noticed for the wrong reasons.

Social ads do a better job of avoiding being overlooked by injecting elements from a users social graph. The familiar face of a Facebook friend and their just-posted ratings of a product they bought.

The technology that allows social ads to work isn’t just “cool,” it also affords greater opportunities to help avoid the rat race of producing content as a means to promote other content in order to sell something.

Miss the previous SIM dissections?

Read Part I

Read Part II

*This survey is a solid sample of an average user. Fluent surveyed 1,000 US internet users about how technology affects the way they engage with brands and make purchasing decisions. 56% of respondents own a smartphone but they aren’t necessary “tech savvy” users considering 62% of them use Internet Explorer as their primary browser.