Mass Marketing

In the internet era businesses are blessed with more potential for contacting a spread of customers than ever before, nonetheless, at the same time, that potential is more or less confined to a pair of giants of the world wide web: Google and Facebook.

The second of these has just been crowned the most frequently used site on the web with 700 million members spending an average of 372 minutes connected each month. It's also gearing up for an flotation next year, and as a result the social network is working to make itself more profitable, and therefore more appealing to potential shareholders.

Building a business strategy founded on social media is difficult. A large percentage of experts think that Facebook is critical, but it's close to impossible to work out how much to invest, or where to focus your resources.

The biggest issue is that a innovative concept can earn unprecedented attention for practically free: a video that goes 'viral', is an obvious example. However, even if you hire people who tend to have brilliant ideas, it's not guaranteed that you'll enjoy the same attention as a rival who gets lucky.

The trick, then, is to do things the old fashioned way. It is genuinely likely that Facebook users will start feeling drowned by publicity and stop reading it.

What a company must do is create a relationship with it's clients via social networks. One good example of this recently was a supermarket which asked it's 'friends' on Facebook to complete the sentence "If I had 5 minutes to spend in the store, I would buy..." This prompted thousands of posts that were slipped into friends wall messages and all of a sudden gained fantastic amounts of attention.

Even though Facebook is the home to 33% of worldwide internet advertising, in reality it only has an ad turnover percentage of 0.04%, so investing in an ad campaign is clearly not the best campaign.

In the internet century, campaign executives have to be more clever than that and genuinely try to understand how clients use social media before effectively attempting to market to them. It's a time crammed with opportunities, it's simply working out how to grasp them that's the challenge.