Oh dear, has the social networking bubble burst already?
I don’t know about you but everyday there seems to be a new article in the mainstream press – you know those quaint old fashioned papery things - about all the nastiness that social media sites can do to you personally or to your company. Only last Sunday in the Sunday Times mag, no less, there was a whole page given over to how to commit Facebook suicide – ie how to remove your profile from the site and extricate yourself from all those annoying emails from almost complete strangers wanting to be ‘your friend’.
So not only have networking sites hit the big time, become conventional and middle aged (certainly my 16 year old nephew thinks it’s very uncool to be on Facebook or heaven forbid MySpace) we are now actively looking to remove our profiles and clear our desks with Google-free days. Crumbs – what’s a girl to do? The novelty has worn off – time to look for something new to while away our leisure hours.
But perhaps it’s not so in the business world – a few weeks ago over here in the UK we all heard about a campaign on a parent’s website called raisingkids.com that got up such a head of steam that it managed to get Woolworth stores to withdraw the sale of the ‘Lolita’ bed for young girls, complaining at the name’s link to the famed novel about a paedophile. Then there was the campaign that spiralled through Facebook last August forcing HSBC into a humiliating u-turn over its decision to scrap interest-free overdrafts for university graduates not to mention the collective sigh of relief when Cadbury brought back Wispa bars by popular bloggers’ demand and the getting Sky Sports to change the way it displays the scores on live football matches.
As the Independent asks, is this real social activism or just people in ones and twos trotting out their own hobby horse in the hope that others will leap on the bandwagon?
Which brings me neatly on to the subject of the SLA Europe seminar next week!
OK, so maybe we’ve already got bored with social networking but the business world certainly hasn’t. There are all sorts of challenges for organisations – they need to monitor the impact of all this chatter, make sure their reputations remain intact.
Simon Bradstock, VP Corporate Products at Dow Jones and Andrew Bernstein, President of TNS-MI/Cymfony will presenting a seminar in London next Tuesday 26th February about their products that can help organisation monitor just that.
http://www.sla-europe.org/events/documents/SLA_Europe_Feb_08_Seminar_flier.doc
bookings@sla-europe.org
See you later
Gill
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