Social Networking - an explosion in a vacuum
More and more I'm reading about so called experts in business social networking. These people I tend to treat with a little caution for fear that they may have pre-existed as the eternal business networker and have simply rebranded themselves following the cataclysmic rise of the likes of Bebo and Myspace. However if we look to understand the root of the rise of youth social networks we should perhaps acknowledge that technology has only provided a vehicle for a point in time were offline communities are at their weakest. Children and parents are bombarded with horror stories of child abduction, inner city violence and our post Thatcherite materialist era has left little of the community high street, church group or Tupaware party network. It is perhaps in this vacum, that youth social networking had the chance to explode - and it is perhaps for this reason that traditional marketing departments should take heed of the new online marketing metrics that operate in this communication environment. This is an area where trust is earned through the effort of communication and where broadcast will always be shunned as irrelevant unless engagement is both highly targeted and creative. This is really only the beginning of the change that will expand over the next 10 years. We can suggest that the www is only 10 years old as a comms media, but the real changes are happening faster now as a result of 85%+ broadband access. Marketeers need to look and learn fast or suffer at the hands of newly empowered consummers.
