BuyDomains Newsletter

Francois: Several years back I started a company developing product life cycle solutions. The whole system was based on blogs, tagging and Wikis. Unfortunately, companies were still recovering from the Internet bust, and although they were starting to buy software, they were not ready to buy a new category product such as ours.

As a result of this experience, I developed a real passion for these new collaborative tools. I love that they democratize content by making anyone a producer, archivist, contributor, or commenter. I started blogging myself and eventually invested in Coronte, a blog company that produces well-known blogs such as FastForward.

Francois: I was an advisor on LinkedIn so I am definitely a fan of the social networking tool they have created. However, I have to say that there are more sites screwing it up than making good use of these tools! Most are running the same old corporate speak on their blogs — continuing to use interrupt marketing instead of creating conversations.

Francois: The first thing they should do is try to see if there are existing communities or tools out there that they can take advantage of. If a company has a bunch of employees that are already blogging they should try to influence them to start talking about their work in their blogs.

A great example is my own thought leadership endeavor using Facebook. In just 6 weeks I assembled over 1,800 members in my Marketing 2.0 group in Facebook.

By utilizing my existing communities and contacts on Facebook I was able create this large group without spending any money. All it cost me was my time!

Another great example is that of Mark Cuban on "Dancing with the Stars". I don't even watch TV but I followed him because he did almost all of his vote recruiting through MySpace and Facebook. It would have cost him thousands if he did this outside of this medium!

For small businesses, it is all about leveraging the right tool at the right time.

Francois: I think we'll see a lot of additional developments in video. There is a company called Voxant that can syndicate content from multiple sources allowing you to search for it and create your own video play list and post on your site.

The mobile market is another area that will continue to take off, especially in Europe and Asia. People are already using it to create content and the tools around this will become more and more sophisticated. This goes a long way towards democratizing content creation and broadcasting since, although not everyone has a computer, almost everyone has a cell phone. The real interesting thing to note here is that mobile operators know exactly who you are, where you live and, if your phone has a GPS system, where you are in real time!

Another interesting trend is the continued adoption of social networking tools within the corporate infrastructure. Avenue A/Razorfish was quoted as saying that they're going to throw out their Intranet and use closed groups on Facebook instead. I think we'll see more of this as companies get over the "not invented here" problem, as well as supposed security issues, and, instead, adopt products that are already out there and being done right.

Francois: Some great places to visit to learn more about social media are Fastforward, my blog on EmergenceMarketing.com, and Technorati.

If they are already web savvy, they can use an aggregator that gets a lot of stuff like Digg or Reddit and subscribe to the best articles that are popping to the surface because of sophisticated algorithms, or by votes. They could also create their own custom feeds and set filters to show only the articles about social media that are relevant to their market, e.g. real estate. This would take a bit of time but would be a worthwhile exercise if they wanted more targeted information.

In terms of investment, companies should spend ALL of their marketing efforts on social networking. They should make it their first priority to find out where their customers are spending their time. Otherwise, they will be throwing more and more money at traditional marketing with fewer and fewer results.

Even if they have a product that stands on its own, they only have about 3 months before someone else catches up with it. Even then, there are so many other companies out there that are messaging the exact same way it is incredibly hard to get through the clutter.

If they can find the folks that are caring about the space in which they play, their marketing results will increase and costs will go down.