The Multi-Tentacled Social Network

Even two or three years ago, a person would think of a social network as being just one website, like MySpace or Facebook. At sites like this, they could connect with friends and family, play games, make business contacts or even become potential customers, and they hardly needed to go anywhere else. But now, when speaking of social networking, what one really means is having accounts on a great many websites, allowing people to do everything from business blogging to casual chatting to posting information about events and news.

To lump everything together in the phrase "social network" is actually an error, because the phrase doesn't indicate that there are in fact several different kinds of social networks. Take the example of www.flickr.com, where people can upload photographs into an endless photo stream. What makes this website more than just a static photo album is the way people can add each other as contacts and comment on each other's photos. They can form groups where everyone contributes photos on a certain theme, thus becoming a virtual social media club centered on those photos. And pictures can be tagged with keywords so that anyone looking for pictures of, say, bush fires in Australia, can instantly find them, no matter who posted them.

Flickr is very different from Twitter, which is a social network where members post real-time remarks in 140 characters or less. Yet many Twitter people post links to photos on Flickr, prompting contacts to comment about the photos in both sites. Some of those people may also be members of www.linkedin.com, a network geared to more corporate social media, where people make business contacts and develop more professional relationships. Yet LinkedIn has now enabled its members to link directly to their Twitter feeds, to bring the two separate networks together.

This interconnection is happening more and more, as every person's social network spreads wider and wider. Some programs allow people to post messages on Twitter and Facebook simultaneously. The site www.livejournal.com is a blogging site with comments and groups, and lets people post their twitter feeds as blog content. The sites www.goodreads.com and www.librarything.com, two major book cataloging sites, can be linked to people's personal blogs or to Facebook. And Flickr photos and YouTube videos can be embedded in almost any blogging site. Every person belongs to only one network, but it's composed of many different networking sites, whether they are social bookmarking sites, business blogs, or places like Facebook that contain almost everything. The new social media is adding a much more literal meaning to the phrase "world wide web."

Related topics about social network
Social Networking And Return On Investment
Big business social media efforts may produce great results, yet never be fully measurable. How does one quantify good will? If customers enjoy their conversations with a company and begin to feel a certain brand loyalty, can the value of that be calculated? Social networking can produce those things and other positive results, without any accountant ever being able to measure them. It may be that businesses will just have to accept that "increased good will and loyalty," even if unquantifiable, are perfectly acceptable returns on their social media investment.

The Main Priority In Social Media Marketing
The reason, of course, is the fear of losing control of their own brand. But social media marketing can ultimately be beneficial to the companies that integrate it with all their other marketing strategies. For one thing, customers will feel listened to, especially if they see their genuinely valuable suggestions being taken up by the company.

Strategies For Social Marketing
Big business social media plans are developing in a major way, and many of the large social networking websites are now in the sights of the big corporations. However, these companies should be mindful of the actual purpose and function of these websites as they make their social marketing plans. If they are not prepared to engage the customers as equals on these networks and have a genuine back-and-forth exchange with them, then their efforts to use social media will backfire and bring them the sort of publicity they do not want.