Facebook and your customers

by Dan Matthews - Thursday, 13th September 2007 -

Exclusive: the future of social networking, according to one of the world's great technology entrepreneurs.

Guy Kawasaki knows a thing or two about technology and communications. In 1984 he was in charge of promoting the new Apple Macintosh as a founding employee of the company.

Now he’s one of the world's foremost technology bloggers and has created a new web project: Truemors.com, a site providing interesting and unusual nuggets of news from around the world.

You could say he has his finger on the pulse...

He’s well placed to discuss how business will communicate in future, and he thinks Facebook (among other social networking sites) will be the way forward.

I interviewed him recently – here’s a snapshot of what he had to say:

“No single network will control the world. Instead, there will be multiple networks such as Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, Friendster, etc.

“Each of them will have tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of 'inhabitants'. At this size, each one can support a series of businesses within the community, so the key for real estate agencies, marketing consultancies and recruiters is to hang up their shingle in these communities.

“In a sense, it’s no different than if you found out that a new housing development was being completed with 100,000 people. Restaurants, real estate firms, service stations, etc, would rush in. It’s the same thing.”

In other words, offline businesses have no excuse – especially if they are consumer facing. His site offers marketing, research and advertising opportunities – so get there before your competitors do.

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