Social Network Marketing: Think Differently about "Placement"

"Social networking" is a term I hear used interchangeably with "online community," "Web 2.0," and, most discouragingly, "viral marketing." In the latest intallment of The Commoncraft Show, Lee has done a nice job clarifying the term for those unfamiliar with it: 

What I like here is that Lee describes social networking in a platform-independent way. Obviously, there are lots of different kinds of web site that could serve as a social network, including blogs, which aren't typically considered social networks. 

Online social networking is a human activity, not a technology type. While there are some very familiar sites like MySpace, LinkedIn, and Match.com that are typically lumped into a category as "social networking sites," I'm much more inclined to think about social networks in architectural terms. 

From a social architecture perspective, online social networking sites are clusters of linked identity-centric web spaces. While on the one hand, there's no real hard-and-fast line between "social networking" sites like MySpace, which are structured around the individual identities of users, and "social media" sites like YouTube, which are structured primarily around individual pieces of content and secondarily around "channels" (groups of content objects with a common author), on the other hand this difference of emphasis has a huge influence on how these sites are used. 

Most significantly, social networks increasingly cross boundaries between web sites. Behind the power of web services, APIs, widgets, and portable content (like Lee's video above), relationships and content move effortlessly across domains. 

Even more interestingly, social networks are beginning to cross boundaries between our physical and digital lives. Add-on services like Moo's 3rd-party-based business cards herald a new generation of real-world artifacts of our online experience. 

Marketers wanting to tap into "the all-powerful magic of" online social networks need to shift from thinking about (and budgeting for) site based-initiatives and campaigns ("Let's do something on MySpace this fiscal year") and begin viewing social networks as a relational architecture, independent from and superimposed against what I'd call the superficial architecture of mere web sites.

Comments

[Wallace Nuanez]

I love those "in plain english" videos!