C3 has caught the social networking bug, and, for its sins, has decided to run a blog. As a company that has been around for nearly two decades, and that’s installed many thousands of channels of communications technology during that time, we believe we have valuable and justifiable opinions about issues that affect the telecommunications industry. We would welcome your feedback on what we have to say.
As blogging is just a small part of a much wider social media phenomena, we thought it would be appropriate for our first entry to be about social networking. As the most popular websites in the world are social media ones, social networking is not something we can totally dismiss out of hand without having had a go.
Social networking is a natural extension to traditional networking – the major advantage being is the access to much larger audiences on a much wider scale. If you are shrewd, (not that I fully understand what I am doing at this stage), social media can be a great way of raising awareness, building business relationships and generating new business opportunities.
It is easy to see the appeal for large B to C brands; Adidas,are working with Bebo to promote their latest range of footwear, Orange have run a campaign on Facebook to attract more customers, major airlines are launching their own social networking sites in response to the changing nature of the travel industry….. and so on.
Everybody is jumping on the “social networking band wagon”. Marketing budgets for digital marketing and social media are growing as even the smaller companies realise their value as a way to engage with new audiences, obtain feedback and better understand the needs of their customers. Social networking conferences are occurring on a regular basis, (I was at the Social Networking World Forum myself the other day).
Indeed, social networking is even being adopted at the highest level, Barack Obama, for example. Many new commentators have argued that the US President would not have won the election had he not taken advantage of interactive social media and web 2.0 marketing opportunities to engage his voters.
With thousands of social media novices like myself having a dabble, and with millions being invested in this field, there are not many organisations that can afford to ignore its marketing power.
Read our latest newsletter to find out more about who C3 are and what we do. I, along with many others, am also on a learning curve and would love to know your thoughts.
Sue Hunt
Tags: social networking, web 2.0
Hi Sue,
There is no doubt the growth in Social networking has been huge ….. I even Twitter myself…
I would see the sustainability of many of the enterprises as an ongoing business as being a challenge …. advertising alone will not be sufficient funding and the more you force advertising to users the less attractive / appealing the networking becomes.
A classic case of searching for services that users would be prepared to pay for and providing a mechanism to pay that is acceptable.
The days of tradditional media companies paying huge sums for volume users web presence businesses is over firstly because they don’t have the money and more importantly everytime they have done it the asset has greatly decreased in value when they try to make money from it ….. or an untainted competitor enters the market and steals all the users …
Cheers
John