By Tom Wainas
November 19, 2007

Your next client, partner or investor may be waiting for you online. Social networking software started in the late 1990’s, the idea of ‘six degrees of separation’ quickly evolved into application-specific sites, and was designed to help users find friends or acquaintances. Social media (described as, ‘Internet destinations that interact with users in some way’) means that social media

includes blogs, photo and video sharing sites, and networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

Social media has rapidly become an essential part of any marketing strategy. People-powered content is becoming one of the most powerful business tools we’ve seen in decades; as a result it is believed social networking will be integrated into everything from health care and education to scientific research.

Joining an online social network can put you in touch with thousands of like-minded professionals around the world and was originally designed to foster human interaction, and not to promote products. Times have changed - marketing your organization on a social networking site is closer to traditional Internet marketing. You can build brand, drive web site traffic or even sell products.

Marketers can choose to target users based on: Keywords in their profiles Declared political views Relationship status Education status Their workplace

The shift has been happening for years with MySpace leading the pack with the integration of media within social networks. Facebook is now gaining momentum with applications which allow members to list magazines, books, and music which they prefer, directly on their profiles. These types of applications allow for integration into iTunes and YouTube where members can share music they like and recommend and their friends can listen to it and ultimately purchase. This is an important trend further adding to the viral nature of social networking and the way music, books, etc. are distributed.

In fact, according to MarketingSherpa, 58 per cent of consumers prefer web sites with peer-written product reviews. Social networking enables marketers through social applications to engage directly with their specific target audience in their native social environment. It also enables marketers to engage with networks of friends via the social graph. Marketers have an opportunity to potentially get access to valuable buying patterns of thousands of users.

Some common goals of social media marketing are brand awareness (positive brand impression), an increase in traffic, business development and networking. There are different ways to market via the social media:

• Social news aggregation portals let you submit content and talk about it with your friends
• User-generated content sites let anyone submit content, and it’s the most visible component of the site, along with things like rating and sharing
• Popular blogs have thousands of readers and links and can give out lots of visibility - these tend to have active participation in comments
• Social bookmarking sites let you tag content and the most popular content becomes most visible
• Mainstream media portals now often allow voting, comments, reviews and most talked about stories

Over the last few years billions of ad dollars have shifted from traditional media to the Internet – this landscape remains volatile as spending continues to grow online and remains relatively flat elsewhere.

Today, social networks have power beyond ad revenue to almost act as a customer relationship management tool for companies selling products or services. Even though there still is a lot of focus on advertising and banner ads and the amount of traffic a web site generates, it is important to look beyond these traditional forms to see the real potential –

leveraging the connectivity of the sites and using them to form communities around products, media or services to really be in contact with your users.

As we learned from the dot-com bust, value is not in click-through or eyeballs; it is revenue that matters most. The short future ahead will be fun as we try to find ways to monetize the online community beyond just traditional web advertising.

For more information about this article, please contact Tom Wainas.