When Cash is King, head for Social Media

Have you ever considered the wealth of brand opportunity that Social Networking Sites (SNS) offer multinational corporations?

Twitter is receiving a lot of press at the moment – in part due to the £160,000 civil servant job that the government just invested in hiring a ‘twittercrat’.  But what about the more community based SNS?  Linkedin, Facebook, MySpace – what’s their potential?

Do some quick sums... how many people in your company are SNS-literate?  This isn’t whether they know how to ‘tweet’, ‘RT’, create ‘#feeds’, or plant a ‘tweet bomb’ this is simply: do they have a profile with more than 100 friends?  (An astoundingly low figure for most Y Gen profiles).

Now, if you have recruited around 500 graduates in the last 5 years -  and the statistics say that most of these will have at least two SNS profiles (PEW 2009), what is the combined brand value of a 1,000 profiles updating their status to say they now work for your firm – and a little feed going to each of their networks of friends to alert the update of their job status?

If you are a product or service provider it gets much better... why not set up a competition (internally or externally) with a bottle of champagne as a prize (£60 at worst, but a healthy incentive for most Y Gen) for an individual or team to create a Facebook or Linkedin App that introduces SNS users to your company product or service.

Facebook recently had its 5^th birthday, and recently a bit of exclusive Nielson research, revealed in an NMA podcast (27.02.09), that nearly 50% of the UK population (17.6 million unique users) are now on Facebook!  Isn’t it time you monetise the Social Networks of your Y gen?