This article was originally published at Digital Biographer, also written by David Petherick, in January 2008. That’s Eight. A year ago. I think it still is very relevant a year later…
The significance of social networks is now starting to become obvious to the marketing departments of larger companies, largely due to two factors – 1) Traditional advertising channels are proving less and less effective and 2) Marketing and advertising agencies have started to realise where people are spending their time.
They have seen the writing on the wall – with one particular statistic likely to be a challenge for many a marketing manager: “Social networks will become the dominant channel for viral marketing campaigns – email has been the dominant channel for viral marketing campaigns since the mid 90s, but social networks will overtake it in 2008.”
Another fact that’s staring marketers in the face – a tipping point that only has one further hurdle to clear: “In October 2007, Social Networks accounted for 7.7% of upstream Internet traffic to all other websites, making the category the second most important source of traffic after Search Engines.”
The next hurdle of course is for social networks to become a more important source of traffic than search engines. That’s a whole blog of its own, however.
An article in this morning’s Financial Times is entitled “Business urged to woo social network figures“, and uses language very firmly couched in the tradition of ‘moving product’ and the pages of publications such as ‘Campaign‘. This all suggests to me that although businesses may have woken up, they have not actually smelt the coffee – they still have the urge to sell cereals.
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