Social Network Marketing - Keynote synopsis

In his keynote presentation on 'Social Networking Marketing', Bill Daring suggests that web 2.0 developments can no longer be considered as fads - and now is the time to engage in social media and use it to inform and persuade audiences.

What are UGC, Web 2.0, Blogs, Social Media, social bookmarking, media sharing sites and RSS ?

In case you haven’t noticed the Internet has changed. The Internet allows for one person to discuss with many people in real time. Users can share information and network with experts or peers, to proclaim opinions and disseminate these around the world very quickly. By 2010 it is anticipated that 70% of the content on the web will be user generated (UGC).

"The seemingly unstoppable rise of Social Media is the phenomenon that’s on every marketing professional’s lips, but it is also one that very few fully understand how to exploit." Slashdot.

Some of the many Web 2.0 platforms which can do this include IM (Instant Messaging), MySpace and Facebook, Flickr and Photobucket, YouTube, RSS feeds, Wikis and Blogs.
The implications of this "information sharing" revolution has been dramatic:

• Brand credibility is being defined online and via WOM on bulletin boards community portals and blogs.
• The music industry, for example, has been transformed with bands launching on MySpace and avoiding doing business with traditional record companies .
• 'Citizen journalists' and individuals with 'insider knowledge' are influencing vast networks of people, driving forward a group/crowd mentality of 'truthiness'.
• There has been a quantum shift from online 'push' channels to socialised networks where information and brands can be distributed by RSS feeds

Some believe that sites like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and countless other Wikis and blogs are stealing a lead on main stream media so fast they’ve already raised questions as to whether social media could spell doom for the communications industry as we know it.

Some Interesting Facts

UK users average 5.8 hours per month on Social Networking Sites - the highest in Europe.
Blogs
Japanese is the #1 blogging language at 37%, English is a close second at 33% although English is the most even in postings around-the-clock. At time of writing there were 75.2 million blogs, growing by around 120,000 every day and 1.5 million new posts daily.
MSN
Live Spaces (formerly MSN Spaces) has 115 million monthly unique visitors, more than 2.5 billion page views per month. Microsoft says there are 93 million Live Spaces (not necessarily users) out there.
MySpace
MySpace now has 24 localised sites in 20 countries, in 12 languages, including French, German and Japanese. MySpace said the number of visitors to its European sites had risen more than 68 per cent in the past year, to about 25m per month.
Facebook
Facebook has 26.6 million unique visitors per month and 15.8 billion page views. There are an estimated 40 million registered Facebook users. Recently, Facebook in the UK added one million users in one week alone.
Youtube
The name “YouTube” has become synonymous with “online video sharing”. According to Comscore, the website maintains a sizable lead over competitors with 205,593,000 unique visitors per month.
Flickr
Flickr has over 4.5 million registered users and 17 million unique visitors per month. They have just under 230 million total photos uploaded and 900,000 new photos are uploaded daily on average.
Delicious
Founded in late 2003, del.icio.us pioneered tagging and coined the term "social bookmarking". Currently with over 2 million users it is just one of many such services.
RSS
Really Simple Syndication Feeds are now well and truly established as a platform for web 2.0 information distribution. It enables individuals to ‘subscribe’ to information automatically which can be delivered to an RSS reader (e.g., igoogle) or via widgets which can be embedded into a web page.

Social Media Marketing Examples

Bill will show some examples of how companies can use Social Networks in their marketing strategies.
Blogging
"There are online conversations about you happening out there - whether you like it or not,". So what should you do about it?
The first step is to understand "who" is saying "what", and what level of influence they have.
Many corporations have decided to make one of those voices theirs and become part of the conversation with the ultimate goal of engaging their audience and improving their service or product.
Once engaged in these conversations, it is critical to listen to what the community is saying and measure any content – both positive and negative – before responding where appropriate. Engaging in social networking requires a significant investment in time and effort, and should become an established part your communications strategy.

Media Sharing
One of the first video virals was Terry Tate: Office Linebacker. These were a series of short comedy TV commercials created for Reebok. Tate was first shown at Super Bowl XXXVII in 2000. "Terrible" Terry Tate, is an American Football linebacker who "gives out the pain" to those in the office who are not obeying the rules. There are a total of 8 episodes all. Now exceeding 20million recorded views on Youtube alone.
Producing the Diet Coke and Mentos eruption reaction has become a popular science experiment after videos were posted on sites like Google Video and YouTube.
YouTube was a platform for the social networking of the Cadburys Gorilla Advert on 31st August.

Photosharing sites such as Flickr offer ways for companies and organisations to provide value to consumers. KMP have created a photo-sharing application for Chester Zoo where photos are uploaded, watermarked with the URL and shared with zoo visitors and Flickr users alike.

Facebook Applications
The race is on to monetise social media sites, and one way that is emerging alongside ppc advertising is the advertising widget. A widget is an embedded piece of content within a website, which receives information from a remote source e.g. via an RSS feed. This "information" can also be product based, games, or media sharing. SocialMedia is a Californian based company, part widget developer, part widget hosting provider/ad network. Along with Lookery, the company is one of the first providers of monetization services for Facebook application developers - filling some of the vital Facebook Platform infrastructure gaps.

LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site, mainly used for Business to Business networking. As of October 2007, it had more than 15 million registered users, spanning 150 industries and more than 400 economic regions (as classified by the service).

Podcasting or webcasting
The term "podcast" is a combination of "iPod" and "broadcast”. This is because the first podcasting scripts were developed for the Apple iPod which allow podcasts to be automatically transferred to a mobile device after they are downloaded. Podcasting is really another form of Feed Marketing, as podcasters' web sites offer direct download or streaming of their content. They often have the ability to be syndicated, subscribed to, and downloaded automatically when new content is added, using an aggregator or feed reader capable of reading feed formats such as RSS or Atom.