Social networking involves using online services (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, YouTube) to connect and interact with a community of people through online publishing and discussion.
Social networking allows companies and individuals to increase their online visibility, gain credibility, and build meaningful relationships with others.
Unlike a traditional company website that focuses on the particular company, social-networking websites are portals to a multitude of standardized user profiles belonging to various individuals and organizations. Membership in a social network (in addition to having a traditional website) offers brand owners certain advantages over using a traditional website alone; most notably, complimentary exposure and ability to interact with other network members. There are hundreds of social-networking sites and service providers. Some, like Facebook and Twitter, cater to the general public, while others, like IQONS and Model Mayhem are more niche-oriented (these two focus on fashion and modeling industries respectively).
Popular Social Networking Tools
| Service | Description |
| Badoo | Social-networking website. Allows users to create profiles, upload content and grow their network by inviting or accepting invitations from other users. Offers various communication tools to encourage interaction between users. |
| Bebo | |
| Friendster | |
| MySpace | |
| Odnoklassniki | |
| Orkut | |
| V Kontakte | |
| Business-oriented social-networking website used for professional networking. | |
| Meetup | Interest-based networking focused on meeting offline to participate in various activities |
| Ning | Interest-based networking tool that allows users to join or create networks based on specific interest. Brand owners may create a network around their brand. |
| Blogger | Blogging platform |
| Livejournal | |
| WordPress | |
| Meebo | Instant messaging tool that supports simultaneous connection to multiple IM services, allowing user to communicate with other users without having to use the same service. |
| Tumblr | Microblogging application |
| Flickr | Social-networking website centered around photo sharing |
| YouTube | Video-sharing platform |
| Vimeo | |
| FriendFeed | Aggregator service that consolidates updates from social networking websites, blogs, tweets, etc. |
What Others Are Doing
General Electric Company
GE has been using a custom-build professional-networking tool called SupportCentral to connect vendors, customers and employees for many years.
GE blogs: http://www.grcblog.com/, http://www.gereports.com/.
GE uses Facebook to attract IT talent and has set up discussion forums for employees and general public. GE was one of the first companies to be granted a namesake URL: http://www.facebook.com/GE.
GE also has YouTube and Twitter profiles used to broadcast company news, http://www.youtube.com/user/GEreports; http://twitter.com/GE_reports.
Exxon Mobil
Exxon Mobil is a prime example of a company with zero involvement in social media and a case study that demonstrates that if you do not manage your online reputation, others will do it for you.
Exxon Mobil is not using Twitter, or any other social media forum to communicate about its corporate operations. Last year, when someone impersonated the brand on Twitter, the incident received a lot of media attention. The offending account was later suspended.
Another well-publicized hoax involving the brand was perpetrated by a Facebook user creating an event called Free Gallon of Gas Day, http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=12912038029&ref=nf.
Brand owners should be monitoring the discussion and mentions of their brands in social networks. Brand owners should also consider participating, because, as this case study shows, the power has shifted to those who participate.
Procter & Gamble
Procter & Gamble has challenged itself to understand and master social media tools, regarding social media as the future of marketing. To better understand the power of social media, the company has recently hosted Digital Hack Night, bringing together marketers and social media experts. People were split into four teams of about 40 people and each team had been given a unique newly-created URL to promote and generate t-shirt sales for charity through social networking. The exercise was to be accomplished in four hours.
In 60 minutes through networking, well targeted ads, SMS messaging, and viral videos we have generated 1200 hits for a site that didn't even exist before 5pm tonight.
This exercise illustrated the power of social networks to promote a brand and to generate sales by driving visitors to a traditional website that otherwise may not have attracted any customers.
Sample YouTube videos made in the course of the project can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sU-3WrAx8XI&feature=channel_page and at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrm9pp7F3tk.
Procter & Gamble, like many others, has recently claimed a personalized URL for its Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/procterngamble.
Overview of Most Popular Services
Twitter (http://www.twitter.com)
Twitter is a micro-blogging service that lets users publish short (up to 140 characters) messages or "tweets" which appear on a user's page (https://twitter.com/USERNAME) and are transmitted to each of the user's subscribers or "followers." Users can restrict their readership to a circle of friends or allow open access to anyone. Users may send and receive tweets via the website or use browser- or smartphone-based applications for added convenience and extra features.
Twitter allows users to add keywords or "hashtags" to their tweets by prefixing a word or phrase with the # symbol. The @ symbol followed by a username is used to direct a tweet to the attention of that specific user. These features are exploited by various applications. For example, Twitterhawk (http://www.twitterhawk.com/) is a targeted-marketing application that sends automated customized responses based on specified keywords and user's location; TweetBeep (http://tweetbeep.com/) keeps track of conversations that mention you, your products, your company, your website or blog, or anything else you want to monitor, and provides hourly reports. There are applications for pre-scheduling tweets to post at a certain time or periodically at a given interval; for managing your followers, for posting updates to other networking sites, for aggregating and organizing your friends' feeds, etc.
Brand owners may use Twitter to communicate with their tech-savvy followers, to build a community of brand supporters, create awareness, draw traffic to company website, gauge customer satisfaction level, get customer feedback and re-tweet praise from customers to potential customers; as well as keep track of competitors and police brand abuse.
Similarly to URLs, having the company name or housemark as the username is desirable for the company. The goodwill associated with the CANON mark, for example, has attracted 1,363 followers (as of this writing) to http://twitter.com/canon, a significant number considering that this user has posted zero updates and is not following anyone else.
Defensively registering every possible combination of company name and trademarks is not practical, in our view, because such "ghost" usernames may detract from the company's official account, diluting a brand's Twitter presence.
Twitter prohibits impersonation and name squatting and is known to honor companies' requests to protect their brands.
Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/)
Facebook is a social-networking website that allows users to create profiles and join networks organized by geographical region, city, school and workplace. Users can share information about themselves, add other users as friends, and communicate with other users in a variety of ways including posting status updates, sending private messages, writing on user's virtual wall, instant messaging, "poking," sending virtual gifts, "tagging," and sending event invitations.
Companies and organizations may set up a company page to provide information about the company, publicize company news and upcoming events, share photos and videos, host discussion boards, and recruit talent. Individual users may then choose to become "fans" of your company, and generate interest in your company among their friends.
Companies and individual users may also create groups—clubs organized around a particular idea or topic. For example, Motorola's fan group bills itself as "The latest and the greatest, of one of the most stylish brands in the telecommunication business!" and, as of this writing, has some 2,844 members.
On June 13, 2009, Facebook has introduced a customized URL feature, allowing users to claim http://www.facebook.com/USERNAME as a link to their profile. Although on a very short notice, brand owners had been encouraged to register their marks to prevent abuse.
Blogger (https://www.blogger.com/)
Blogger is a popular blog publishing platform. Blogs that do not publish to their own websites are hosted by Google as subdomains of blogspot.com, e.g. http://USERNAME.blogspot.com/
Maintaining a blog increases one's online visibility and is a good way to showcase one's expertise and leadership in a particular field or industry.
We do not believe that defensive registrations of company names, marks, or officers' names as usernames are practical and do not recommend creating them. We recommend hosting company blogs on the company's official website(s).
YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/)
YouTube is a video sharing service. Users may upload videos to their profile or "channel" to share; search for other videos; view, rate and leave comments; subscribe to the channels that interest them; tag favorite videos for further reference and embed video files into other sites.
Google markets YouTube to brand owners as "the world's largest focus group."
A brand channel with a strong following can provide tremendous insights into the consumers who interact with your content and your brand.
Google's recent integration of Google Analytics, its web-traffic tracking tool, with YouTube brand channels has the potential of giving brand owners a much richer and deeper understanding of their brand channel's performance, enabling them to track such metrics as how long visitors stay, repeat visits, bounce rate, and page views per visitor. Brand owners wishing to tailor their videos to a specific audience would benefit from knowing where channel viewers are located geographically and what languages they speak—information that Google Analytics provides.
Vol. 53, June 2010