Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [219]
Although Wikipedia is most likely the most well-known of these sites, what is not typically advertised to the general user is that these sites allow anyone to contribute information or answers. Regular contributors are rewarded by their active participation and sometimes ratings from other readers. Because of this, the trust and value of contributors are based on active participation rather than actual expertise. Even if an expert in an area is a contributor, they are not accorded the same weight as an active contributor.
These sites provide authority-type links to websites when they include links as a citation or reference within the article, answer, or topic page. Most of these outgoing links are noted with a NoFollow exception to the link, which tells the search engine that this is not a trusted link. Adding this feature reduces the amount that these sites are being used by webmasters and SEO marketers to generate links to websites.
The marketing value is primarily in the visibility of the website, such as Wikipedia. In some personal marketing experience, visitors from Wikipedia tend to be high-converting visitors, and Wikipedia helped make the sale. There is still some debate on whether link value is passed, despite the NoFollow links on these sites, so I generally recommend keeping knowledge-sharing sites as part of a larger strategy, mainly because of their visibility in the search engines.
Networking
Networking is one of the most well-known uses of social media and one of the most pervasive. Social networking allows people to set up a personal profile online and connect with other people through their profiles. There have been many sites and applications throughout the years that have allowed people to do this such as Bebo, Orkut, Xanga, Friendster, Second Life, and MySpace. The most recent incarnations of social networking that are more well-known are Facebook and LinkedIn.
Facebook is the social networking leader with more than 500 million users, as of this writing in early 2011. Competing with the likes of Google and YouTube for visitors but dominating both in terms of activity and length of time, Facebook allows users to build their own profile and connect with other users. With a profile, users can add video, images, recent purchases, status updates, location check-ins, and discussions with friends. It creates a wide-open window into the users’ life for all the friends in their network. Users can share as much or as little as they want; however, privacy is always an issue with Facebook.
For Facebook to make money, the only assets they can bring to advertisers are user demographic, personal information, and purchasing behavior. Many users of Facebook do not want this information shared. However, privacy watchdogs are always reporting when Facebook attempts to change privacy settings, and the users share their disappointment of these changes through their status updates.
Facebook allows businesses to create a profile page for the business. Businesses can interact with their fans the same way that users can interact with each other. Businesses can communicate with their fans through the Facebook mail and allow fans to upload images and pictures and provide information or promotions specifically through Facebook. Loyalty, retention programs, and branding dominate the business usage of Facebook, because very few are using it to acquire new customers (eMarketer, www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007934). Although it is not impossible, most users will not tend to “like” a business on Facebook until they have done business with them, similar to a word-of-mouth