Papers & Articles

01/02/2007  |  Search in Social Networking

One of the great joys of being employed in the marketing profession, particularly internet marketing, is that you get to witness the future evolving before your very eyes. The internet evolved from a user-defined community to the major corporate form of communication in just a handful of years. And because of the nature of the beast it is now returning to its roots of providing a vehicle for the individual to communicate with like-minded people who are actually making up the rules of communication as they go.

Embraced by global enterprise, digital media has now spawned the vehicle for Joe Public in London to choose the video or music he wants to indulge himself in and share with Bruce in Melbourne and Lois in Los Angeles. This is true People Power as was intended from the beginnings of the web.

And for webmasters and marketing professionals, this opens up amazing new opportunities previously only available to the Coca Colas and American Expresses of the world. Namely, the ability to sell your product or service directly to the end consumer on the street in Manchester, New York, Mumbai or Beijing.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has over the past few years been developed into a science (or art, depending on your point of view) that can ensure people who are looking for the goods you supply can be directed to your website and be encouraged to part with hard earned cash. But the way the web is developing back into the public domain has caused some to question the ability of SEO to deliver.

The buzzword among the digital chattering classes is Social Networking. What exactly does that mean? Well, literally translated, social networking is meeting people, who you would not ordinarily meet, through mutual contacts. There is a theory that you should be able to meet any other person on earth through as little as six networks. But then, recruiters in the network or multi-level marketing industry may have invented that.

The phrase, Social Networking, today relates to the technological advances that have handed control back to the ordinary woman or man in the street. Sites like MySpace and YouTube gives individuals the opportunity to promote themselves, keep in touch with friends, make new friends and chat to anyone who shares a common interest. Chat has been around for a few years but the ability to upload music and video has brought a brand new dimension to the internet.

Control is with the consumer, particularly those in the 16 to 24 age group who exercise much influence in today’s retail sector. So how does today’s media savvy marketer actually break in to this new world of self-promotion? Surely, by definition, social networking goes against what marketing stands for. By handing the initiative back to the consumer, marketing is dead!

Maybe to some, but to a few forward-looking visionaries the opposite is true. The opportunities have become limitless. It just takes a new way of looking at what’s going on.

By making your site more easily visible to the new wave of custom search engines, such as Technorati, and posting links back from blogs and podcasts, you can become well known to a new audience.

Link building is the major factor in conventional SEO. None more so when you want to reach the new generation of social networkers. Adding a blog and creating white papers are just two examples of how to increase your site’s linkability. Another is to make bookmarking and tagging easier. So you need to make your content attractive enough for people to want to bookmark your page (not just your home page). You need also to make it simple for them to bookmark you. Encourage them with a “bookmark me” button.

Making your content more portable is another good move. Not just PDFs, but audio and video files that can be transported to multiple devices and shared will increase your linkability.

These are just a few ideas on how to make your site more Social Networking-friendly. More developments are being introduced on a daily basis. Never was there a better time to increase your visibility among fast-growing markets. Never was there a more pressing need to keep your eye on the ball.