Marketing and creative careers are increasingly "impacted," as some like to say, by the social networking phenomenon. On the one hand, marketers are called on to figure out strategies that take advantage of the potential offered by social networking sites from LinkedIn to YouTube to MySpace. On the other hand, marketers and creatives are called on to design, develop and market new social networking sites for companies as diverse as Nike, Wal-Mart and Air France-KLM. In fact, the proliferation of social networking sites led Ellen Sheng to lament in this WSJ article [registration required], "The social-networking bandwagon is getting awfully crowded."
I was wondering about the reasons behind this and I think I came up with something [Alert the media!], thanks in part to Nigel Hollis of Millward Brown. Last October he wrote a post on his blog entitled, "Is your brand a party animal?" and his main argument, rather loosely paraphrased, was that most brands were too boring, conservative, or self-centered to succeed in the social media space. He used the analogy of a party to drive his point home. The popular people at a party are those who are engaging and entertaining, and the same goes for the popular "people" (i.e., those with a million friends) on MySpace, for example.
Could it be that companies start their own social networking sites because they know their brands would be unpopular on the sites that already exist? Probably not. I would guess that the motives are actually more selfish than that: Companies start their own social networking sites because they want to aggregate their customers, gather information from them, and present them with more targeted promotions and products.
Two questions present themselves: "Who will develop the simple, plug-and-play, out-of-the-box social networking site development kit?" and, "Who will launch the social networking site for people who want to or have already launched social networking sites?"
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