The Philosophical Comparison Between Marketing and Social Media

There can be a correlation drawn between the changes in the philosophy of marketing and the philosophy of social media. From push to pull, bomber tactics to niche groups, they relate more than we know.

The Social Media world has been slowly switching from a single massive community to a niche community with a smaller membership status.

Myspace and Friendster blew up on the scene as massive social networks with the potential of connecting to hundreds of thousands of people. The best part about the massive networks was you weren’t limited to location to find “friends.”

With the advent of Facebook we saw the social media community moved to more of a nice, locale based system. You were catering to a friend base that may already exist in a specific geographic or social region. Facebook moved to a social interactive platform rather than a massive social community spread over a huge land base.

Now we have seen the power of NING unleashed upon the Internet world. With the introductions of NING came other sites like grou.ps. NING gave any layman the ability to create a very specific and niche social networks based around group specific ideas. Let’s say you were in a biking accident in Colorado. Try NING, I’m sure you will have a home.

Facebook has become increasingly more niche focused with application development and demographic/geographic targeted advertising. My definition of geographic would be the relation to a friend or connection. More often than not, they are in the same geographic location.

The philosophy behind marketing has moved in the same focus. What was once a bomber approach mentality of hitting as many people as possible to gain a sale. Is now switching to a more personal and direct market approach. We are not pushing a sales message at a demographic. We are now designing niche messages and a targeted story to PULL people toward us. Sell people on our offering.

Social media has followed the same path. Moving from a massive, no holds barred, network to a more niche community based system.

What is next? We have had discussion on Smaller Indiana around the concept of Web 3.0. What does Web 3.0 look to you? Is there a web 3.0? Maybe not.