My First Interactive Marketing Virtual Conference Experience

On October 16th, I experienced my first interactive marketing virtual conference called "Embrace Social Networking and Extend Brand Awareness." Social Networking is primarily a U.S. based phenomenon that will be growing. After listening to three speakers, social networking seems like it will be the newest thing in the marketing and advertising world. Todd Wasserman, editor for Brandweek, focused on how marketer's need to embrace social networks. He said that marketer's need to figure out an effective way to advertise for social networks. Often and I agree with this, certain social network sites, such as Myspace and Facebook scare people away. An example given was when the new 'Mini Feed" application was added to facebook, which made facebook become more of a stalking device, as opposed to a social networking device. Marketers need to come up with ways to not make sites seem creepy. Currently, I think marketers need to target teens and advertise social networks to them first. Teens are using these sites the most right now and they are an easy group to influence. Even though, Myspace is so big right now, despite all this buzz, social networks are seen as a small niche in media; however, 90% of people belong to social groups.

Alan Schanzer, the second speaker was trying to see how marketers can use social networks to interact on and offline with consumers. The use of the internet is constantly growing, with 50% of web-content being produced by consumers. Social networks are the perfect new innovation during this time of intense use of the online world. My class and I, can be a part of this next statisitic, that there are currently 70 million blogs produced and 120,000 new blogs created each day. We definately impacted this number by all creating blogs this semester for class. The last speaker, Barton Goldenberg, discussed how business's will start to have to get use to including social networks.

Like all new marketing phenomenas , the biggest keys are to start by focusing on the target audiences, building and engaging honest relationships, and hope that it will blossomed. I think social networks, if advertised well, can become very successful especially during this time of increase internet use.