I’ll admit, I didn’t really ‘get it’ at first. It clicked for me a few months ago when I changed the way I approached these applications.

“I Don’t Get It!”

Most people assume that these websites / applications are largely recreation and localized to only them and a handful of friends. This really isn’t the point of social networking. What’s the use of adding a few people you already know and making your account private? Nothing new can be learned or gained from that and makes it about as fruitful as sending a text message on your phone.

True social networking begins by opening yourself up to the world and interacting with others. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. There are a lot of crazy weirdos on the internet, but the chances that you will come across one is small, and even if you do, you can block them from all communication in a few clicks. I can’t vouch for MySpace, but I know that Twitter and Facebook are very big on security and deterring jackasses from contacting you.

The value in these applications lies in making friends with strangers and interacting with people online. How can these be used as tools? The best part about these sites is that it’s free across the board, there is no charge for using their services. With that its become a viable marketing platform for companies, bands, and entrepreneurs. Startups like CoTweet and LivingSocial have dominated the third party arenas, turning a sweet profit and infinite wealth of data from it’s users. Without going into too much detail, CoTweet allows you to share Twitter access within your company providing separate logins for users, but tracking everything they do. You can assign tweets to a user, receive direct replies, and it appends their initials to each tweet so you know who’s who. The advantage of this is you can have multiple people using Twitter on your behalf, instead of just one or two, and it’s all tracked.

Tweeting ‘n’ Bookin It

People love instant gratification, instant feedback and interaction. If they feel that a company is responding in real time, their opinion of them will be exponentially more positive than a company who takes 2 weeks to respond via email or phone. For instance, Comcast experienced a large outage last month. I tweeted that Comcast was down, and a few minutes later a representative from Comcast, Bonnie, had replied to me and asked my location so they could report back where users had no internet services. It didn’t fix our issue, but I thought that was pretty cool. Authorize.net had a datacenter damaged by fire, effectively halting credit card processing services for a LOT of people this summer. They sent all their updates out over Twitter, almost every 10-15 minutes, keeping their users informed of the progress and letting them know when service would return. That’s good customer service and PR to boot.

Consider another scenario, getting the word out. A lot of people have trouble letting others know about something they have to offer. That’s the beauty of Twitter and Facebook, they can be used for exactly that. I recently had a breakthrough in just how effective the two of these sites are combined last week. AOL Radio was running a promotion to advertise their new station, All Request. In the spirit of that channel, they were accepting tweet requests from 12PM to 7PM that day only. Whatever bands got the most tweets would be in medium rotation the first week or two. A plan formulated in my head, I knew that I had access to 45,000 to 50,000 emails of people between Twitter, Facebook and the message board for CKY. What if a percentage of them participated in this? Could we make a difference?

From Nothing to Something

I didn’t expect everyone to do it, but I figured if at least 10% did, something might happen. By 10AM I let everyone know what was going on, and by 8PM saw on AOL that CKY would be one of the bands played. We didn’t quite have the numbers to edge out American Idol artists as the Top 10 Requested, but who does? That’s millions of teeny boppers. But all things considered, it was a great effort and example of how this service can be utilized to your advantage. We gained exposure, word of mouth, and a spot on the station.

That same week, we tried the same idea and encouraged people to participate again, this time using Twitter and Facebook combined. Jimmy Fallon had put the word out he was looking for new bands to feature on his show, something ‘not radio rock’ that everyone knows (and loathes) like Nickelback or Three Days Grace. Everyone wrote in such a volume that Jimmy Fallon posted that they would be looking into it and applauded the effort of the fans in spreading the word. Would you ever think that a simple marketing campaign would get a response from a late night talk show host?

Now CKY has a good shot of being booked for the show, all because of some Twitter and Facebook marketing that took a few seconds by a few thousand fans, which can result in millions of viewers seeing them on a late night show. If half of them bought their album, or hell, even 10%, that’s a significant boost- and this is all without record label involvement or marketing firms. It’s a domino effect, hypermarketing, hyperdomino, (insert as of yet to be coined Web 3.0 terms).

The experience there really opened my eyes to the true potential of leveraging social networking applications. If you’re just going to update people with what you’re having for lunch, how many paperclips are on your desk or what you drank Friday night, don’t expect to get anything out of the time invested in using these websites. But if you’re looking to do more, you may find that you are rewarded with new friends, leads,  new clients, maybe even Jimmy Fallon.

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