The study, which was fielded in fourth quarter last year and first quarter this year, involved case studies from two Carat clients, Adidas and Electronic Arts. It looked at three different types of ad interactions available through MySpace: display ads, custom marketer MySpace pages, and branded profile skins and features consumers can use on their personal pages. It also measured lift in four traditional ROI metrics: intent to purchase, positive brand image, intent to recommend and unaided awareness.

"We wanted to get marketers away from the idea of friends-as-the-new-click-through-rate as a measure of success," said Heidi Browning, senior VP-client solutions at FIM. Instead, the company hoped to coin a new metric to represent the value of the viral effect of users plugging brand assets into their MySpace pages. "This is the first study to say there is a value associated beyond the media investment [because of] the viral capabilities that social networking enables," she said.

In the study, Adidas created custom skins for MySpace pages based on a new soccer cleat it was marketing. EA ran a contest on MySpace that pitted bands against each other for the opportunity to have a song appear in a new video game. In the case of EA, 70% of the people who said they"d buy the game (intent to purchase) were influenced by the viral elements or recommendations from friends.

The tricky part is that just being present in the social-networking space won"t be enough to capture the momentum effect. Mr. Briggs noticed three attributes of the campaigns that attracted people: They gave consumers a way tell their own stories using the brand as a reference point; they gave people something to talk about; and they gave people opportunities to realize their dreams or fantasies through components such as sweepstakes and contests.