Much has been made recently out of Twitter leveraging their feed to search engine providers with Facebook making a similar play. (Though not as successfully.)
Once Facebook figures out how to get its members to opt in to this. (*Hint* By providing a separate public feed apart from their regular status updates that go to friends. *Hint*) There will exist a phenomenal opportunity for marketers. It’s their own virtual marketing research lab.
As a marketer, how would you like to get immediate feedback from the public on how a business strategy, service or product offering will be taken? That’s the potential here.
Of course, just because the opportunity exists and your business concern exists doesn’t mean that this is a slam dunk. You need to have established a history of cultivating an active consumer base and engaging them in meaningful dialogue. You need to be trusted and be prepared to weigh in on issues that may affect them even if it doesn’t translate into sales. (Not immediately anyway. Trust = preferred brand and that definitely translates into sales, so be patient and cultivate away. You’re savvy and understand how to engage social networks. The consumer driven market doesn’t scare you and you don’t try to shoehorn old marketing tactics into new technology.)
Once the ground work is done between you and the Internet you’ll be able to get consumers to opt in to marketing research. With the correct phrasing they will play an integral part in shaping the future of your business concern. More importantly, they’ll give you information to help figure out needs that they may have that they haven’t even articulated yet. That’s the real synergy in participating with social networking.
Once you establish that there may be a need for something, the benefits of a real-time Internet could go beyond the initial market research of your network. Now you can query a word or term and tap into feeds to find what the untapped potential of your business proposition is.
You can be the Kreskin of your business and present psychographic/ demographic data to support a business direction. How do you think that will affect your marketing budget and the general POV a company takes towards the department? Looking good? Yeah, I thought so. Use this effectively and you can be a hero to both the business and its consumers.
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