Social Networking Meets Marketing

My take on social networking is that it's a great feature and should be implemented across a wide range of consumer services - it's not the endgame but the grease that enables better discovery and context.  For example, i'm more likely to use a plumber reccomended by my trusted social network than a random listing in the yellow pages (see Insider Pages as an example).

Mayfield recently invested in Jobster under this thesis - applying social networking to recruiting to fix the problem of candidate overload in current online recruiting sites.   

I believe the sector of marketing services is the next big application for social networking.  Can a marketer leverage social networks to come up with cheaper and more targeted ways to acquire customers?  Can the marketer use the social network to virally propagate the message among the network in a consumer friendly manner?  It's not just about using MySpace to acquire customers - its about bringing the social network to a point of transaction or information to "turbocharge" the likelihood of an exchange.   

If you have some ideas around "social networking applied to marketing" - drop me a line!

Comments

[Zoli Erdos]

Raj, CourseCafe is a startup in the cross-section of Social Networking, Vertical Search, and Social Tagging. I profiled them here: CourseCafe, the “Other Facebook”. The post has links to TechCrunch’s writeup, amongst others.  These writeups (well, mostly TechCrunch) produced a lot of momentum: 6 campuses launched, thousands signed up.  They are actively looking for investors to expand on this momentum.

[Jason L. Baptiste]

Great to see another consumer internet VC blogging. We're developing an application based upon productivity ie- jobs, for sale, housing, community notices,etc. I see social networking as a stand alone application being somewhat *iffy* from a long term investment/ business model standpoint. I'm referring to the let's make friends with a million people we don't even know, while posting fake pictures of ourselves. Reminds me of the nightclub scene in Miami. Every 2 years there is a "new hot place' that everybody starts going to. But, I think social networking plugged into something like jobster or what we're building is very powerful. It lets the content creators interact with each other, and create a new form of communication. Example- Individuals looking at housing or job listings, can interact with the content creator to see if the living or working arrangement is really for them. They get to see the person behind the content, the same way a blog shows a person behind a company or website. All in all, social networking plugged into content driven sites, lets marketers interact with the users in a much more dynamic way that provides an amazing ROI for the marketer. I'll be sure to follow this blog more closely Raj.

-Jason L. Baptiste

[Helen Wang]

My experience with social network is that my real friends whom I know well don't bother to connect with me through those networks. They'd still rather connect me in person, i.e. pick up a call, get together for lunch, etc. The people I connect in the social networks are so-called "cyber friends" - the people I have never met but we make friends in cyber space. So, there is a delimma: how to use the social networks for effective marketing?

[James]

A prime example of lame reviews from our cyberfriends at Insider Pages:

New Sound Car Stereo
I needed a newer alarm system for my car so I was told I could find some of the newest alarms at New Sound in San Francisco. I bought the new Alpine alarm with remote start, auto window roll up, auto trunk releas, proximity sensor, and remote pager. They took good care of me and my M3 at New Sound. Turn around on the installation was 2 days which is pretty fast.

[Jeb]

Quick note on InsiderPages (and Yelp). In '98 there was a company called VillageBuzz doing the social network + local search + recommendations idea. They were shuttered due to the Bubble implosion. But solid ideas come back.

[Timothy Post]

Web Badges and widgets (HTML, Flash, and Javascript) are the medium that will facilitate the viral growth of "social networking applied to marketing." They are the "flying seeds" of the internet.

See my blog for further details and input from others in the "social scripting" space.

[Bradley Twohig]

Ive got some early guys out of the valley in this area who I should introduce you to.

[Jennifer Jones]

Raj: i agree with you that
social marketing services is a big area for growth. Having been a technology marketer for 25 years, social media is making lots of opportunities for marketers. Check out my podcast on just this topic at podtech.net. The podcast is called Marketing Voices and is a weekly podcast on how social media is affecting marketing. www.podtech.net

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