Spread of Web 2.0 Amongst SME's And Singing Stars!

I was just going through some old magazines this morning (February, 2007!) and came across an interesting advert from Ford, which was advertising the Ford Focus. The advert, part of the Ford Focus 'Own the Road' campaign, features a musician Ben Griffith who is "starting out, which means a load of gigs" and therefore, he needs a "decent car as much as a good guitar." Whatever your thoughts on Ford's advertising techniques, the interesting thing is that the artist was able to plug his MySpace page on the ad. Further inspection shows a busy My Space page with a healthy "fan base" and some half-decent music.

Going back about a year the words "Social Networks" and "Web 2.0" used to draw a blank look on the faces of my clients - both those attending workshops and from my consultancy. Well, that has changed very much. Clients are now seeing the importance of trying to engage and interact with their audience on the web and tools like Facebook, MySpace, Blogs and Flickr are becoming their most important tactical tools. Over the past month I have seen 3 of my clients take up the "Web 2.0" challenge - one is a Welsh Langauage Teaching Centre, the other is Record Shop and the third is an Online Bike Retailer.

Back in June a little-known singer called Paul Potts, from Port Talbot, Wales, became a global celebrity when he won the Britain's Got Talent TV show. What was interesting was that social media sites like YouTube and MySPace started to propel him to a global audience. The show was transmitted on the British channel ITV1 over the course of a week - from the 9th to the 17th June. By the time of the grand final the video clips of Paul Potts singing opera on YouTube were hitting the hundreds of thousands of viewers - today just 1 of the clips had received 6.5 million views!

His MySpace site was receiving messages of support from all over the world - I even saw one from a US fighter pilot! Paul has already done the rounds of TV stations in the States and his, yet to released album, is already number 20 in the UK album charts and number 17 in the USA. starting to become a household name - all in 1 month!!!

Looking on Technorati the week after I found that it was a hugely popular search term and hundreds of blogs were discussing either the ITV1 performance or the YouTube videos.

There is huge potential for the use of Social Media tools in a firm's marketing arsenal and the potential to generate revenue and interest is phenomenal but the key for small companies is to identify the most suitable social media platforms.