More and more the balance of power is changing in favour of what the consumer decides a Brand is all about. Many factors have contributed to this but the most significant being technology and the ability to rapidly disperse information in a totally transparent manner giving the person-on-the-street that ability to voice her/his voice.

The internet and specifically web 2.0 has provided the various platform for this with blogs, social networking sites, forums, wikis to name a few. Marketers need to embrace this change, understand the conversations that are happening around Brands in this space and continuously find ways through passive engagement adding “content” value and allowing consumers to then “pull their Brands in” rather than aggresively pushing our one-sided messages onto them.

See Andy Rice of Yellowwood in an interview on eTV talking about this trend.

facebook is about to hit 400,000 members in the South African network, sitting at 399,294 at this very moment. The growth in the last two weeks, in SA network has been phenomenal. On Sunday, 14th October there were 360,000 members… in 13 days the network has grown by 11%. There are currently around 50 million active members worldwide.

Many cynics of social networking sites say that facebook is just a “fad” and members will soon move onto something else, but with the continual renewal of applications and the easy-to-use format which provides a phenomenal platform for communicating with friends online, this is one “fad” that aint going anywhere.

To add credibility to this statement, a deal has just been concluded with Microsoft who have agreed to invest $240 million into facebook for a 1.6 percent stake in the company; this then values the site at around $15 billion. Under this agreement Microsoft will be the exclusive third-party advertising partner until 2011; this says to me that Microsoft do not see this social networking site as a “fad”; they beat Yahoo and Google to the deal table, who were also in talks to acquire an interest in the company.

facebook will be making a major announcement on the 6th November, in New York, regarding a new way of advertising online which enables companies to better target ad placement ensuring that they can block unwanted associations. This announcement happens to be at the same time as the Adtech “business of modern marketing” conference is being held.

The US online advertising industry is currently at around $40 billion and analysts predict that it will double in size within three years; with online advertsing in South Africa said to be at around R200 million for 2007 we have alot of “catching up” to do and marketers need to understand the value of social networking sites…..these are places that lots of people do spend there precious time out of choice and will continue to do so. facebook has also announced recently that 50% of their members are over 25 years of age, so it is not just a youth site anymore.

…..I know where I would be planning to spend some of my marketing budget….