BusinessWeek: “Social Networks Are the New Web Portals”

Last month BusinessWeek published a feature article on social networks.

The title of the article, “Social Networks Are the New Web Portals,” suggests some striking — and perhaps controversial — comparisons. If social networks are really the new web portals, does this mean that MySpace, for example, will one day dethrone a portal like Yahoo!? Or, does this mean that, one day, the average internet user will write all of their emails using Facebook instead of Hotmail or Gmail?

Well, one can prognosticate all they want. On his part, the article’s author Jeffrey F. Rayport does a good job of picking apart what’s inevitable and what’s not in the recent rise of social networks. For instance, he emphasizes that the largest ones are right now aggressively vying for users’ time and attention via Facebook Connect, OpenSocial, Google’s Friend Connect, and other platforms and tools. So, arguably it’s not clear who the big competitive winner will be, or if there’s actually room for more than a few innovators.

Ultimately, the strongest of Mr. Rayport’s claims are based on references to hard data. (Here at Involver, we’re big fans of hard metrics and hard numbers.) For example: According to the BusinessWeek article (via ComScore), in October 2008 alone Facebook users spent an unprecedented total of 34 billion minutes on Facebook. Indeed, Facebook is now giving Google a serious run for its money (as far as this time-spent metric is concerned): during the same October period, Google’s users logged a 1st-place yet still comparable 42 billion minutes on the company’s many websites.

The takeaway is simply one that we’ve mentioned before: digital marketers have an enormous opportunity to capture many of those billions of minutes now spent on social networks.

As for the argument that social networks are fads, we need only counter with a high-level yet immediately intuitive reminder: the most popular social networks have placed an ingenuous bet on the eternal value of human connections. On a site like Facebook, where friendships are rebooted; massive rallies are organized; billions of photos are uploaded; brands and celebrities are being gushed about; and even real food is (or, was) given out for free — in consideration of all this and much more, it’s evident that the users of social networks have bought in significantly and wholeheartedly. There will be no mass exodus anytime soon.

Where do we go from here? For digital marketers who recognize the value of social networks, a first necessary task involves formulating a plan of attack, or more exactly mapping out the territory at hand. As marketers, we need to figure out where we should establish our beachhead on social networks, as well as what tools we need to use. As a video marketing company (rich, interactive video = the powerful tool) that creates branded Facebook video campaigns (these campaigns = the beachheads), we think that we’ve hit on some great answers to our client’s marketing challenges. And we’re excited to create more answers over the course of this new year.

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