Wednesday 7 January 2009

Mining for internet gold


The UK’s social media industry is like the goldmines of the USA 200 years ago. Basically, online is the future; for how long we don’t know, but it is about to arrive in a big wave and engulf everything that came before it.

As with early American prospectors, the first one to find the first rich seam and sell it is likely to become a very rich person indeed.

Although the web has been a prominent part in our lives for over 15 years, we still haven’t answered the age old question of how do people make money from it? Obviously Google, Yahoo etc have been making money for donkeys, as have website designers and such like, but how does the common agency use social media to make money?

Twitter, Stumble, Wordpress, Friendfeed, Digg and Flickr are almost days away from being the new marketing tools for businesses and a playground for marketing and PR agencies. For as long as we can remember, PR and Marketing agencies have used newspapers, magazines, radio and television to position clients in the public eye. Editorial and adverts would be placed within these domains and the better the domain, the more horses would be brought to the water, so to speak. The internet has now overtaken newspapers and radio, second now only to TV as the most popular way to access news. The ‘apps’ above have the potential to be highly effective marketing tools to reach large target markets and individuals, linking them to a chosen blog, website or platform.

In short, there is currently a huge race on to find the best way to market companies in the online space and whoever can reach (or build) the biggest number of fans/followers/advocates/customers through these apps and sell their services to clients first will be the modern day equivalent to the 19th century American prospectors.

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