Drive business with social networking

By social networking, I mean primarily MySpace and Facebook, but others fill the gaps like Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, Tailrank, Technorati, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Propeller, DropJack and BlinkList.

Social networks are essentially online communities. Their success has translated into business opportunites, and they've rapidly become a vital ingredient in diverse marketing strategies. So what are some of the reasons hosts have taken this plunge?

Increased Customer Loyalty: Loyalty and sales increase tenfold (as churn nose dives) if you consistently share quality knowledge base information in a format your clients can relate to. It allows for dynamic colaboration with prospects and clients beyond the scope of your corporate website.

Additional Revenue Streams: Social networking sites can be monetized in a variety of fashions, e.g., micropayments or partnerships, but social networks tend to be more content focused, diverting drift from the distraction of ads.

Branding Opportunities: Design your network to be customer-facing and customer-centric, thus expanding opportunities to promote your services.

Enhance Customer Support: Are you looking to raise the bar from satisfied customers to ‘Raving Fans’ - clients who will advocate your products and services in the industry? Social networks are a great support resource. Raving fans invite their friends, share their stories and promote your business for you.

To your business success

- Steve

I've tried it before. It doesn't really work for my target, but I'm sure it works for others.

Where I work, we took it in another direction. We don't use social networking in the way of using myspace, facebook, etc.

We developed our own social network, and reward users through it, etc. It allows us to get our message to the people that we know will read it, gives them a familiar tool where they can share, network, and communicate, and it lightens the mood around our business. Since we're the entertainment guide for a conservative newspaper, we have to be cautious what we say sometimes, and myspin (the name of the social network) allows us to be open, opinionated, and outspoken, and allows our users to do the same.

It also allows us to become friends with a lot of our readers, etc increasing readership, loyalty, and communication.

I'm not sayin that you should do the same, but it may at least be worth looking into. If you need any help, let me know and I'll help as much as I can.

MySpin sounds like a great idea. We already have MySpace and were considering Facebook, but am now very interested in how you made this work for you.

Hey Mark,

Yes, running your own social network is a GREAT advantage. I've consulted with two companies last year that we were able to develop their own social scene and are now selling their own advertising space to cusotmers etc. KickApps is/was a great tool for one of the clients - the other tested on Dolphin, but moved to some other software.

Personally, I utilize the blogs, facebook and various other places. Not really much on the MySpace. Even Twitter is a handy marketing tool.

Steve, generally we run it like any other social network, but we had a loyal following before the launch of myspin. We simply needed a way to make them stick...give them more to do than read.

It allows us to store user data for our own use, and build demographics. myspin members get rewarded every Friday, when we send out out "myspin eAlert"...the system picks a random member and highlights them for the week, and they win whatever prize we have handy (t-shirts, web cams, tickets, etc)

Conor, we started with phpizabi, but have modified it so much to work the way we need it to, that we're now masters at the API and you would barely recognize it lol.

I'm very interested in other software and the potential of porting users if the software is stable/feature rich enough etc.