With the recent David vs. Goliath battle of Facebook Places (circa. 500 million users at time of writing) head-to-head with the relatively unknown, (yet ubiquitous in its own right), Foursquare (circa. 2.5 million users at time of writing); this quick poll of user activity has proven that yet again, niche-level services continue to prevail.  One is led to believe that Facebook Places will only survive as an internal ‘app’ within the Facebook framework, if it recognises that Foursquare addresses the cognitive behaviour of its users in a congruent manner and seeks to either emulate or work with the said newer network in order to further its own proposition.

The Rise of Mobile

There has been much discussion and speculation regarding mobile as being the future of the web, but relative to the growth of technology in the last couple of decades – mobile’s influence on the market has been relatively slow to reach critical mass.

Indeed, it has been the charge of one particular industry innovator – that is, Apple – who have sought to capitalise and shape the industry almost single-handedly with its iPhone product and platform.  Even Google with their army of genii could only limp into the market, post-hype, with their Android platform; this now dominates the rest of the mobile smartphone market and has set the scene for a new wave of technology, software and user adoption.

Geo-location

So, working slightly backwards in this post, this leads me back to Foursquare, which like any great new startup, has found its niche and stamped its authority on the market very quickly.

It does what it does well; it provides a fun and addictive platform for users to ‘check-in’ to locations; collect ‘badges’; leave ‘tips’ for places that they enjoy visiting; and add other places on a virtual ‘to-do’ list for whenever they are in the area in future.  Even I have found it a particularly useful tool and as active as I am in the digital space, I tend to keep my personal social media activity to a minimum – especially with all this talk of future identity issues.

Perhaps the smartest planning involved in the makeup of Fourspace is its clever attention to business and the model for revenue generation.  This has always plagued the social networks when stepping up to the IPO plate, so it looks like these guys have their bases covered.

The Future?

From my perspective, it does appear that the industry is moving even further into the long-tail – perhaps even more so than was original envisaged by Chris Anderson.  It will perhaps become more likely that generic behemoths like Facebook (or perhaps, just Facebook on its own) will continue to provide the basic structure for sharing a little of everything with your friends – but it will be the specialist and niche social networks that will continue to innovate and form the fabric for new communities going forward.

Services like Flickr, for example, are quickly becoming very large communities in their own right and I don’t see this trend diminishing anytime soon.

The importance of technological convergence looks equally important in this social media revolution; key, converged, but niche-focussed products like the FitBit and Amazon’s Kindle could well be pivotal in forming the social networks of the future.

“Eating lunch at Pret”

“Seeing my mum”

The marketing potential, or potential for anything great on any level completely escaped me as this social network’s roots were forming. To me, it seemed like an inexplicably rubbish form of Facebook, where you only get the status updates – which in my opinion, could be the feature most easily left out of Facebook.

Interestingly, what I failed to notice, was the rapid speed of movement this network had, compared to any other before it. Sure, the growth of MySpace and Facebook, when compared to any other form of social network (especially those prior to the digital age) was incredibly fast and spread like wildfire among children and adults alike – but anyone who had a modicum of something interesting to say on Twitter could easily end up with tens of thousands of followers (if not hundreds) within a matter of weeks or months. This instantly translates into influence and influence – as all marketers know – equals money.

Another odd phenomenon which has popped up recently – is the name-dropping of social networks as part of potential employee CV’s. It is literally bizarre that you can now read lines like:

“Twitter account of over 5,000 followers”

or

“I have a large Facebook/LinkedIn network”

But the truth is, this is a sign of the times. Social media and online marketing as a whole, are finally being taken seriously by the marketing industry, and by every industry that is affected by marketing. Even the large financial corporation (as old-school as they come) where I used to work were forced to cut jobs heavily across the marketing department in all regions; but not one member of the online marketing team lost their job.

John Chow (no relation of mine, I swear – well, not recent ancestry anyway) recently bragged about being paid a figure like $6,000 to Twitter about something or other. Imagine that – an Essex girl’s dream!

Now I have to say, although Facebook wasn’t so great at this due to its really quite good implementation of privacy tools (Ok, so they were breached a few times) and focus on friends and family – MySpace did achieve a similar phenomenon when it grew a certain attachment to the then up and coming online music industry.

So, maybe it’s just me getting old or slow on the uptake (I hated MySpace originally too – now it is a must-have tool in the arsenal of any musician looking to ‘make it’) but I have finally embraced Twitter and would recommend it, not just on a marketing level, but for anyone who even uses SMS or text-messaging on their mobile phone; you can keep up-to-date with all your friends, family, celebrity chefs and Big Brother contestants literally anywhere with your mobile phone.

I wonder if there have been any flash mobs initiated on Twitter?

What many forget is that this really is old hat; obviously, the platform and the technological gimmickry that support them in the form of applications, ajax popups and games are all new, but the underlying concept of social networks – people who are grouped by shared values or beliefs - can really be dated back as far as the turn of the 19th century, when sociologists (I cannot believe I’ve found a use for A-Level sociology) such as Émile Durkheim identified the existence of social networks when studying the interactions between individuals.

So how have things changed apart from the technology?  Well, there is one huge change which I mentioned earlier, which is that some of these networks are now colossal.  Never before have so many individuals been able to congregate and exchange thoughts.

To try and engage a sense of how large some of these networks are, I dug out a few statistics – for example – Facebook currently boasts a community in excess of 300 million – so that’s 300,000,000.  Still not impressed?  Well according to UK National Statistics, in 2008 there were about 60 million (60,000,000) inhabitants in the UK, which means that the population of Facebook, if it were a country, would be 5 times the size of the UK.  How pathetic does our government look now?  Mark Zuckerberg must be rubbing his hands in glee at the thought of that kind of power.

So this obviously brings me round to the point of all this discussion (I know I’m a little long-winded but there is always a point); marketing is always about communicating a message to as many (relevant) people as possible and naturally, marketers will always love social networks.