06.26.06
Social Networking as a Marketing Platform
I received a comment on my earlier post about the potential future of the social networking space. Reader Andy has written his own thoughts on the subject of social networking and brand marketing. It’s an interesting read, and I left him a comment with my thoughts which I’ll not re-post here.
It does get me thinking, though. I’m quite sure when these sites were starting up they were not intended to be “platforms” for use as marketing vehicles by third party corporations. The closest to that expectation is probably the MySpace movie and film areas, but those are targeted more towards independent (and perhaps less savvy) content producers.
Because these sites have traction and a lot of page views, they have become more appealing to companies, but I wonder how that will drive the look, feel, and features of such sites going forward.
While it makes sense for Jack in the Box to have a myspace profile, it must also be somewhat scary for the company. When a company creates a profile like this, they’re really establishing a secondary official online presense. Secondary, of course, to their own web site.
But there’s a key difference - the company doesn’t really control a lot of aspects of the new site. They don’t own the server infrastructure and as far as I know they don’t have a formal arrangement with the social networking site operator. It’s guerilla marketing for the Forture 500.
I wonder if social networking sites will pick up on the economic potential of formalizing the relationships with client companies to give them more certainty over the look, feel, stability, etc. of this secondary online presence.
Will new marketing tools and APIs be created to allow companies to fully capitalize on these profile pages? I’d say it’s early in the game and hard to say, but if I were starting a competitive social networking site I’d be thinking about this.
Andy made the point that a company’s profile name on a social networking site is starting to gain the cache and economic value that we saw in the domain name speculator wars of the late 1990s. I’m not sure that I’m fully on board with that hypothesis just yet, but I can see how it could potentially play out that way.
The question, in my mind, is framed as, “Does ‘Jack’ blogging on myspace have more resonance with customers and other interested parties than formal press releases in the news or investor relations sections of their corporate site?” I bet it does, but proper execution is going to keep digital marketing consultants on their toes.
Tags: Social Networking, Marketing, Advertising, PR
