Latest Interviews
Yann Motte – ‘Social Networking: The Future of Business’
Posted: Sunday 9th Nov 2008
While social networking sites like FaceBook and MySpace have a reputation for being a magnet for vain shallow youths, Yann Motte, of webjam.com thinks otherwise, as his site shows. In fact, he believes social networking will be the way businesses will reach out to their customers in the future, as his talk at our monthly Wired Wessex event demonstrated.
But of course, the best way to make his case is for Yann to tell you in his own words…
“Social networking gives any organization a viral engine for brands to leverage on what the community does best. In addition, they give a simple and easy-to-use social publishing platform to publish & share information with privacy, member management and collaboration thrown in.
“Most importantly, however, they let you stay in touch with your customers. Through social networking they can talk to each other and you and provide content for your site which can be used to promote the brand.
“Social networking is also a useful tool for non-profit organizations, brands, media and e-commerce companies, whilst the member sites created can range from the professional, to the personal, to the topical, to simple fan sites or clubs and societies.
“This has many possibilities. If you are a charity, let your volunteers take over the projects and the community around them. If you are a sport federation, let your members organise events & tournaments between themselves. If you are a magazine publisher, let your readers take over the subjects they are passionate about. And if you are a brand, let your clients talk about what they achieve with your product or service.
“The best examples come from webjam’s first live partners:
- ChoirZone, edited by Zone New Media, gives choirs across the UK the ability to easily create and manage their site and community and allows them to stay connected.
- The Other Side, a free paper distributed on the London Tube, which goes beyond comments by members by letting them create their own communities across the topics they like.
- The Conservative Party think tank CPS launching an e-democracy initiative on: http://policystudies.cps.org.uk/
- And the Yamaha music group spearheading grassroot music education: http://www.yamahaeducation.co.uk
“We even allow readers to themselves in the shoes of the editor of our simulated Cosmo Wedding Magazine. This allows readers to organise their own wedding within this branded environment.
“To sum up, Social Networking has great potential for business because it allows customers to get in direct contact with you and each other.”