It makes sense that one network would be seen more positively and used overwhelmingly by specific market segments. After all, a social network is like an online party. Why would choose to go the lame, barely attended party? You wouldn't if you were typical. So someone has to win, and that is Facebook.
Most marketers I talk to are stunned at the speed and breadth of change in the social media space. A few years ago, no one had heard of Facebook and now 40 year old moms are sending party invites to their friends and writing on walls in Facebook.
Check out a new report published today that includes some of the leading thinkers in this space. Social Media Projections for 2009 is a straight forward title for a report that is chock full of insight about where things might be heading. You can view it inline below compliments of Scribd. Social Media 2009
Be sure to read in Rhohit Bhargava's piece "What Marketers Did...(2008) / What Marketers Will Do (2009)" He says in essence, we will begin to adapt to the power of these networks vs. trying to force our constructs into a new world. Example, conduct "focus groups" on social media usage by customers to determine "authoritative" results to inform your strategy. In this new world, we can and should use these networks to gather the same information that expensive, formal research would produce.
Facebook has a brilliant new strategy. But if you are over 30, when you first hear it, you might be scratching your head. Some may even be a little freaked.
They want to launch a service that allow you to share your web activities with your facebook friends. The service is called Facebook Connect and allows users to log on to web sites and see their friends behavior on those sites. The NYTs has an interesting article about it today.
What is genius is that it allows sites that currently are not "social" sites, to be pulled quickly and easily into the facebook world. This is really the next evolution of the Share This button. Scary and wildly interesting.....
I am Chief Marketing Officer at Georgetown University and have been in consumer marketing for 10 years. The entire story is a little less obvious...everything from working for the President of the United States to scooping ice cream during the summers. You would be surprised by the parallels.
