• ‘The value of a social network is defined not only by who’s on it, but by who’s excluded’ (Paul Saffo)
• ‘The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate’ (Joseph Priestley)
• ‘A website should be a holistic experience channel’ (Anon)
• ‘If content is king, then conversion is queen’ (John Munsell)
• ‘New marketing is about the relationships, not the medium’ (Ben Grossman)

Borrowed with pride from all over the place.

About 5 years ago in a brainstorming session an idea was created for a MMS service. A name was even given –  ’Does my bum look big in this?’. The idea behind the service was that a person would try an outfit on in a shop and then either the shop (imagine a flagship store such as Top Shop in Oxford Street) or an individual (using their mobile phone) would MMS a picture of themselves to their mates and a clever application would tell them whether to buy it or not by giving an aggregate score.

I always thought we should launch it but the technology just wasn’t ready.

But as with all good ideas they eventually get launched and someone has now taken the idea and run with it…. wonder if we can claim the rights to the original idea in a Facebook style lawsuit…..Watch this space.

Social networking is moving firmly out of the consumer market and into the business market.

There ae increasingly pressing business reasons to capitalise on social networking.  Below are 5 key reasons to boost a companies involvement with social networking:

• the power of recommendation – almost 40% of us trust our friends recommendations completely (this drops to about 10% for brand websites) – linking with social networking sites can build brand trust and engagement
• the power of the transient – short, personal, time linked tweets from brands and companies that we know has a street crediblity and vibrancy that traditional media lacks. A good example of this is Mission Pie, one of their bakers started sending out tweets about new pies and also alerts to interested customers about poetry readings and other events – they now credit their business growth to their growing band of followers.
• the power of the personal – social networking allows and encourages two way conversation, brands can build up rapport with consumers who want to get involved
• the power of engagement – Facebook and Twitter can help employees in large companies interact and share ideas in a more informal way, helping ideas to flow more quickly – they can even share and create with consumers
• the power of serendipity – geo-networking will allow brands to provide personalised location and time relevant information and incentives

But the real power is the mobile revolution – currently 140 million of us use our mobiles for social networking but this is forecast to increase to 600m by 2013.

So get twittering!