Online communities started in the early days of the Internet; software companies encouraged “user groups” to test and experiment with new programs. The Well in
California, CompuServe, and America Online built on that idea and began to attract people to the Internet who didn’t have a community or who felt somewhat on the fringe of the new social order, where the groups were a way to meet and bond with new people.
Today, there are online tools to manage and present your identity, to communicate with people, to bring yourself online and make yourself heard. Today, individuals and organizations are founding Web-based communities at a mind-boggling pace. People are using the Web to find others with similar interests, to shop more efficiently, to learn about products and services, to vent about shoddy products and poor service, and to stay in touch with distant relatives and friends on the other side of the world.
Learning to market to the social web requires learning a new way to communicate with an audience in a digital environment. It’s that simple. It does not require executives to forget everything they know about marketing. It does mean that they have to open their minds to new possibilities, social change, and rethinking past practices. In the pages ahead, I look at what we can learn about these new possibilities and what the social web is about.
Instead of continuing as broadcasters, marketers should—will—become aggregators of customer communities. Rather than broadcasting marketing messages to an increasingly indifferent, even resentful, audience jaded by the 2,000-plus messages the average American is reportedly exposed to every day, marketers should participate in, organize, and encourage social networks to which people want to belong. Rather than talking at customers, marketers should talk with them. And the social web is the most effective way in the history of the world to do just that on a large scale.
The social web is the online place where people with a common interest can gather to share thoughts, comments, and opinions. It includes social networks such as
MySpace, Gather, Facebook, LinkedIn, and hundreds of thousands more. It includes branded web destinations like Amazon, Netflix, and eBay. It includes enterprise sites such as IBM, Circuit City, Cisco, and Oracle. The social web is a new world of unpaid media created by individuals or enterprises on the web.
These new strategies, which have the capacity to change public opinion include: Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Ask, and Live. They collate sites with the best product or service to offer and usually put things in order of reputation. Mobile search is increasingly becoming popular as people on the go check for a nearby restaurant, directions to a store, and the best price for a product.
Blogs are online journals where people can post ideas, images, and links to other web pages or sites. Some appear on personal or corporate sites, while others are hosted on Blogger, BlogHer (for women), Weblog, Tumblr, and other blogging sites. The micro-blog site Twitter, where users post “tweets” of 140 characters at a time, is another twist. Lenovo’s web-marketing vice president says, “I use Twitter to monitor tweets about our brand—looking for people having a tough time with our products. I also see a lot of opportunity to sell through Twitter, and I expect we’ll open a ‘deal’ channel there soon.
Social networks are places where people with a common interest or concern come together to meet people with similar interests, express themselves, and vent. In addition to the examples I’ve already cited, other social networks include iVillage, Xanga, and Stumbleupon. Dopplr is an interesting site for business travelers who share their experiences with foreign hotels, restaurants, and attractions; it will also tell you when, say, three people you know will be in Paris at the same time you are. Some sites are devoted specifically to image-sharing, open to the wide world or restricted to a select few through password protection.
YouTube (now owned by Google) serves up 10 billion videos a month to viewers alone; photos and videos posted on Flickr (now owned by Yahoo!) attract more than 40 million visitors monthly. In traditional publisher- or corporate-controlled media such as newspapers, magazines, radio, and television, the communication is overwhelmingly one way.
Professional journalists research and write stories that are edited and disseminated to the public.
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