The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff

The Value of Online Relationships In business, relationships count. Without them, you are stuck in neutral. Online social networking, via such Web sites as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Hoover’s Connect and many more, enables you to develop extensive, valuable online relationships, including strong links with customers and prospects. Online social networking can build vital business relationships; in effect, it is the latest version of customer relationship management (CRM). Companies that leverage social networking Web sites can infl uence conversations about their products taking place constantly among millions of “netizens” (citizens of the Internet). Consider these examples: • Men’s clothing – Bonobos, an online retailer specializing in colorful men’s slacks, advertises on Facebook (150 million users and growing exponentially) so it can “hypertarget audience segments” and send relevant ad messages to highly defi ned demographic groups. This approach delineates age, gender and specifi c interest in individual sports teams. Bonobos displays “pants for [Boston] Red Sox fans” to Facebook members who cite the “Red Sox” in their profi les. The ads designate “awesome fi tting red cords by Bonobos” as “the unoffi cial trouser” for Boston’s Fenway Park baseball stadium. Bonobos positions other highly personalized online ads to reach fans of additional professional sports teams around the U.S. Social media Web sites enable this kind of hyper-segmentation of the market. Bonobos’ Facebook ads deliver strong “clickthrough rates and immediate sales.” • Computers – Dell Computer launched IdeaStorm, a proprietary, online “ideation community,” to develop ideas and suggestions via “crowdsourcing,” that is, tapping cost-free into the thinking and ideas of its enthusiastic online supporters. The members of Dell’s online social network give it valuable feedback. For example, almost 100,000 IdeaStorm participants recently asked Dell to provide hardware support for the Linux operating system. Prior to IdeaStorm, Dell mistakenly “Approximately once a decade, a radical new technology emerges that fundamentally changes the business landscape.” “Increasingly... conversations about your brand aren’t happening out in the open, but rather within the confi nes of social networking sites.”