Internet: Social networking, online communities

 

Social networking websites are playing an increasingly fundamental part in the social lives of young adults, making them a potentially attractive -and lucrative - opportunity for advertisers. This Bes ...

This article summarises the book 'Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3,000: Running a business in today's consumer-driven world', by Pete Blackshaw (Doubleday, 2008). The boo ...

In this article, WARC Online's James Aitchison discusses the main findings of the second day of the ESOMAR Congress 2008, held in Montreal. Among the areas under discussion are the user-generated cont ...

In this article, Geoffrey Precourt, WARC Online's US editor, reports from the ARF's seminar in New York Advertising Week on the latest industry practices in mining the blogosphere for research insight ...

This paper brings together experiences and learnings about online research communities from some of the world's key practitioners. It provides a users' guide on how to run them and the issues that are ...

This paper describes an internet-mediated netnography of the open source software (OSS) community. A brief history of OSS is presented, along with a discussion of the defining characteristics of the p ...

It would seem that Web 2.0 is increasingly being seen as providing researchers with a range of new possibilities and opportunities. This paper takes a critical look at the use of Web 2.0 as a research ...

This paper examines how online and Web 2.0 applications affect commercial influencing behaviour (by which we mean word of mouth or click, in relation to three core influencing behaviours: collecting i ...

This paper is a case study of a successful web community, I Love Music, from its inception in 2000 through to 2005, when the author stopped running it. While I Love Music and the extended community it ...

In this Viewpoint piece, Nick Buckley of GfK NOP discusses the 'naming of parts' in relation to Web 2.0. Some commentators argue that market research has traditionally been based on a 'top down' appro ...

This article is an edited version of Geoffrey Precourt's coverage of the second day of the Ad:Tech Chicago 2008 Conference. In it, he discusses how companies such as Ford and Nikon are using mobile ma ...

The advertising industry has come to accept that humans are group animals and exhibit herd-like behaviour. This is assumed to apply online in social networks. But this paper argues it is unwise to ass ...

This article summarises the book 'Groundswell: winning in a world transformed by social technologies', by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff (Harvard Business School Press, 2008). The book's central premise ...

The advent of Web 2.0 has given consumers a variety of ways to express their creativity, views and opinions. As such, they are no longer merely passive participants in brand relationships, but are now ...

This paper discusses the increasing importance of consumer driven touchpoints, which can help to drive innovation and product development. Such an approach can overcome the frequent complications in t ...

Previous research has shown that consumers are twice as receptive to communications while they are 'waiting' for something, such as a doctor's appointment. This approach is called wait marketing, beca ...

Behavioural advertising (the tracking of consumers' activities online so as to deliver targeted advertising) is being threatened by privacy issues, especially on social networking sites. In the US and ...

This article discusses two issues relating to the current use of media. The first is that social networking and other internet sites are increasingly collecting personal data from their users which co ...

This article describes Social Vibe, a new plan for an organising system which aims to do for branding what Google has done for direct response. Google's success has been its ability to create a mechan ...

The mobile internet is a fast-developing medium, offering increased levels of access and faster connections. By 2010, 24 million Americans are expected to watch video on their mobile phones; by contra ...

In the time since the advent of the Internet, the influence of online recommendations on consumer decision making has attracted great attention. YouTube and sites with blogging capabilities, such as M ...

Within the user-generated content sites, the role and growth of social networking sites has been undeniably overwhelming. Social networking sites (SNS) generate millions of dollars in revenue and adve ...

This paper examines the online behavior of young people in China, with a particular focus on their habit of manipulating and exchanging images over the net. It discusses a research project based on in ...

This article summarises a selection of the findings of Social Networking: a quantitative and qualitative research report into attitudes, behaviours and use, published by the UK communications regulato ...

It is commonplace to argue that the proliferation of new kinds of data and information has created huge social changes that we still do not really understand. One interesting example is the worry of s ...

Tapping the commercial potential of online social networks remains elusive. Bebo, the 40m-member website, has embraced online product placement, signing up Procter & Gamble, Microsoft and movie studio ...

Virtual worlds and online games often represent levels of engagement and participation that marketers can usually only dream of. As the digital age has rendered many old paradigms redundant, understan ...

Word of mouth (WOM) is attracting increased attention as a vital source of influence on purchase decision- making. The rapid uptake of online social networking and other types of Web 2.0 applications ...

This article describes social networks, their growth and development, and the implications for marketing. The market is changing rapidly and remains unsettled. A key distinction is between 'open' and ...

E4, the UK entertainment channel, created a hit youth TV show, Skins, using MySpace and user-generated content in an integrated multimedia campaign. It delivered an estimated 27% return and an award-w ...