Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

The Sunday Times had a feature on myYearbook the other weekend. The website is the latest in a long lineup of social networking phenomenons. The reason why the website is important to flag is that there are a host of social networking sites that some people probably haven’t even heard of that the next generation of web users are flocking to. From a marketing perspective, I think brands are putting all their eggs in one basket and not planning ahead for the future. In Ireland, most organisations that take out profiles on social networking websites are concentrating on Bebo and Facebook. People tend to think of these websites as destinations when in fact they should be thought of as television channels.

What we’ve seen in television is that channels that captured the imagination of a generation like MTV gradually waned as consumers got access to more stations. In the same way the next generation is growing up on a different set of social networking sites and no doubt the generation after them will do the same.

What organisations need to do is forget about the name of the social networking site and learn about how consumers are spending their time on these websites. Their focus should then be on developing content, which in theory is platform independent and can be used on a variety of sites. Ultimately content is responsible for the popularity of any television station or social networking website. So if you’re not creating quality output then nobody is going to engage/watch.