Social Network Wars are Over; Now the Fun Begins If you’re sitting on the sidelines waiting for the market to pick winners in the social network race, you can stand up now. Hitwise data for 2007 shows that MySpace and Facebook together accounted for 88% of all visits to social network sites. The next closest competitor, Bebo , got a little more than 1% of the traffic.

There simply is no more competition in the general-purpose social network market. Other social media winners include LinkedIn (which wasn’t included in the Hitwise data), YouTube and Flickr. If you're a big brand pursuing a broad strategy, you can safely place your bets on these services. For the next year or two, the also-rans will be busy finding buyers and merger partners.

Now is when it really gets interesting, because now the action shifts to vertical market sites. For many marketers, this is where the more interesting opportunity lies. For example, in the area of health, there’s CarePages.com, Wellsphere, Patientslikeme, RevolutionHealth.com and iMedix. Seniors can choose from Elder Wisdom Circle, Grandparents.com, Eons, TeeBeeDee and Multiply. Mothers can sign up for Cafemom, MothersGroups.com, MomJunction and MothersClick, among others.

And the action isn’t limited to consumer markets. Sermo is a social network for physicians, which now boasts more than 50,000 members. Doctors exchange information about serious medical issues and review cases in real time. Pairup connects business travelers for peer advice, networking and assistance. There’s a list of more than 350 social networks here.

Don’t let small membership numbers fool you. Many of these sites may be attractive marketing venues. Scan the groups, discussion topics and participants and look for content profiles that match your market. Prices are generally lower than those of the big social networks and the audience is far more targeted.

Marketing to vertical communities is very different from mass marketing, of course. If you're interested in building a campaign on Facebook, have a look at what Southwest Airlines and Victoria’s Secret are doing, or the group started by Starbucks fans that has over 60,000 members. There's nothing particularly high tech about their presence. They mainly provide a place where customers can keep in touch with the brand and have access to special offers and downloads.

When marketing to vertical communities, you need to dig deeply into the expertise in your organization. Members of a health-oriented network, for example, want to speak to people who have lots of expertise in nutrition and treatment. Discounts and promotions won’t work nearly as well in narrow markets as they do in broad ones. If you have articulate, interesting domain experts in your organization, now's the time to pull them out of the shadows and engage them with knowledgeable communities. Live chats, webcasts and Q&A forums are particularly effective.

Much of the media attention in the last year has focused on the battle for social network supremacy. With that competition now over, the market will subdivide itself in interesting ways. This process will continue for years, presenting an ever-shifting landscape of new marketing opportunities.

Labels: facebook, linkedin, myspace, social_networks, vertical

  ¶ 1:09 PM 1 Comments Links to this post

  Daily reading 01/29/2008

Facebook-based apps can now run on other sites - Computerworld, Jan. 28, 2008

Facebook's apps community is one of its strongest selling points and anything it does to extend that franchise to other networks works to its advantage. It's hard to say how much of a breakthrough this is, but it's clearly a blocking tactic aimed at Google.

Labels: facebook

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Daily reading 01/25/2008

Scrabulous and the New Social Operating System: How Facebook Gave Birth to an Industry - Knowledge@Wharton

Labels: facebook

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  My Facebook foul-up Take a look at the image below. Is this the type of photo you’d want to put beside a serious business inquiry? I wouldn't. But I did.

It was an embarrassing experience, and perhaps my mistake can serve as a lesson for anyone who’s considering using social networks to transact business.

Last week was the first time I've used Facebook to direct a professional inquiry to a group of my friends. I was looking for some active Facebook users to profile in a book I’m writing, so it seemed a natural place to find them. I used a third-party application called FunWall, which is made by Slide. It looked straightforward enough: type the question, post it and then e-mail a notification to a list of your friends.

So I posted my question and send an invitation to everyone on my friends list, some 225 people. A couple of hours later, my wife sent me an instant message questioning the appropriateness of the image on my FunWall. "What image?" I said. I quickly logged on to Facebook and found my question next to the item below. There were already a couple of e-mails from friends questioning my good taste. I scrambled to delete the original message, which wasn’t all that intuitive, and to post an apology. I received a couple of more snickering responses from my associates, but have no idea how many people saw the offensive photo and thought I was serious.

As far as I can tell, the error occurred when I clicked the button to post my question, I inadvertently clicked the option just below it, which sent a postcard to accompany the question. For some unfathomable reason, the default postcard was the image below. I didn't bother to check the post after I submitted it, and would probably not have even known of my error for hours unless my wife had pointed it out.

So shame on me for not double-checking my work. And shame on Slide for making it so easy for even an experienced user to make such a dumb mistake. If there are lessons, it’s that you should beware of the new breed of third-party apps that Facebook and other sites are accepting. And use that preview feature! You don’t want your best intentions undermined by a stupid user interface.

I’ll just go crawl back in my hole now…

Labels: facebook, social_media

  ¶ 6:45 PM 2 Comments Links to this post

  Daily reading 12/19/2007

On Facebook, Scholars Link Up With Data - New York Times Annotated

Social Marketing: How Companies Are Generating Value from Customer Input - Knowledge@Wharton Annotated

This article covers several examples of successful word-of-mouth marketing efforts and offers advice on what works:

• Keep branding to a minimum
  
• Engage with customers in a way that's meaningful to their lives
  
• Be self-deprecating and funny
• Have a thick skin; you will encounter some criticism

Several examples and case studies are included.

Labels: facebook, social_media

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Report: Half of online adults, 85% of online kids to use social nets by 2011 eMarketer says that 37% of online adults use social networks at least once a month and that the figure will grow to nearly 50% by 2011. Among teens, usage is already well over half and will near 85% by 2011. Social nets clearly offer value that conventional news and information sites don't.





Allan Cattier, Director of the Academic Technology Group at Emory University gave a mind-blowing statistic in his presentation to the Communintelligence Executing Social Media conference in Atlanta last month. He said Emory had surveyed its freshman class and found that more than 80% of the students log on to Facebook 18 or more times a day. Imagine how our institutions will be shaped by this trend in coming years. He also showed a compelling video called "A Vision of Students Today" created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University. See below.

Labels: facebook, socialmediaresearch, socialnetworks, video

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  Still more AMA Webinar questions answered Here are more responses to questions that time didn't permit me to answer during the AMA Marketing Seminar on Oct. 15. Each of these permalinks is tagged “AMA” so you can easily group them together. Thanks to everyone for coming and for asking such great questions. More to come!

Q: Jodine asks “Another great example of this marketing approach is in the new music industry. Independent distributed musicians that gain their fans from MySpace and other social networks. Is this marketing approach what they call grassroots and/or organic marketing?”

A: That's certainly an appropriate term for it. MySpace, for example, has been a gold mine for independent music groups who don't have the marketing dollars to put into advertising. The idea is to create networks of friends who self-define their interests and share favorite bands among themselves. Also, people who produce podcasts and blogs devoted to music often make it a point to promote lesser-known groups. While these tactics so far haven't duplicated the throw weight of mainstream media campaigns, their popularity testifies to their effectiveness.

Q: Sanjay asks, “Are there any potential problems for a regional retailer with just a few locations?”

A: Not that I can think of. In fact, that person is a natural candidate for social media. Facebook, for example, is a great place to find people nearby who are interested in the products that the retailer sells. If I was a camera store owner in Chicago, for example, I might set up a Facebook group for photography enthusiasts to discuss their favorite Chicagoland sites to photograph. You can use that as a jumping off point to create events and even more targeted groups.

A blog is also a terrific way to showcase expertise, and if you're careful to label the blog and its posts with regional tags, you'll do better on search engines. For small businesses on a budget, social media is a godsend.

Q: Kristin asks, “How will the change in social media affect crisis communications?”

A: I can think of a couple of major ways. For better or worse, people are increasingly taking their gripes and frustrations to their blogs instead of going through customer service channels. This makes the blogosphere an excellent early warning system. You should have Google Alerts set up for every product and brand you own, and you should also create RSS feeds from sites like Technorati, BlogPulse and IceRocket that can alert you immediately to new topics of blog chatter.

In terms of responding to a crisis, a blog is perhaps the fastest way to get information online. This bypasses the media gatekeepers and insurers that the message is coming directly from you. If you link aggressively to the blog from your website and from blogs maintained by your employees and outside constituents, you can build visibility very quickly. Sites like Twitter are also increasingly being used by marketers to get messages out to the public instantly.

Q: Viktor asks “What's your opinion on intellectual property rights
with blogging?”

A: There effectively are none, and this is a huge hairball for new media. The reality is that many people who are now publishing online could care less about intellectual property or copyright. I have had entire articles lifted verbatim from my blog and even mainstream media sites and republished without any attribution whatsoever. It's not worth going after people legally in most cases, and that tactic can actually create unwanted publicity.

The entertainment companies have led the charge in trying to bring some order to this intellectual-property chaos, but they have encountered a lot of resistance and their tactics have not always been diplomatic. They have done themselves few favors. I'm afraid that these issues will take years to hammer out, and that our notions of copyright may look very different a few years from now. I wish I could be more encouraging, but a lot of people are wrestling with this problem.

Labels: AMA, blogging, crisiscommunications, facebook, marketing, myspace, PR, socialmedia, socialnetworks, twitter

  ¶ 12:50 PM 0 Comments Links to this post