Once upon a time, there was a hard and loudly enforced social rule on the internet: there were places to hang out and places to shop, and never the twain should meet.\u00a0 Anyone who dared break this rule suffered the wrath of the collective cyberworld, and the results weren’t always pretty.<\/p>\n
This rule was strongly agreed upon and enforced by any means necessary until about five years ago.\u00a0 It’s difficult to say exactly what happened to cause this shift.\u00a0 Likely, it was a combination of a number of factors.\u00a0 For one, there was a general sense that web site users were getting a bit of a free ride and that the money for web site owners to pay their bills had to come from somewhere.\u00a0 Also, whereas businesses who wanted to find new customers before had to resort to reviled options such as direct email solicitation (forever etched in our vocabulary now as \u201cspamming\u201d), now alternate means exist, mostly through non-intrusive means found on social networking web sites. This means that those who are in new or growing businesses who want to use social media web sites to increase their customer base no longer have to worry about the blowback from treading in forbidden waters.\u00a0 However, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t still certain rules that apply.\u00a0 It also doesn’t mean that it’s just as simple as slapping down an ad and forgetting about it.<\/p>\n If you’re a business who wants to expand into the social networking world, here are a few things to keep in mind:<\/p>\n 1) Work with the site, and the users<\/strong><\/p>\n Since large social networking sites need your money to keep going, they’ll be in the best position to tell you what the lay of the land is like: they’re not going to want to see you set up shop just to get chased out of town for not following some social code you didn’t know of until you broke it.<\/p>\n Also, listen to user feedback.\u00a0 While there will always be some trigger-happy users who find spam everywhere they look, generally you’ll get a good idea of what’s fair and what’s not from user reactions.\u00a0 And if you actually asked, you’d be in such a rare category that you’d automatically earn a certain level of respect.<\/p>\n 2) Follow the cool kids<\/strong><\/p>\n Yesterday it was MySpace<\/a>.\u00a0 The day before that it was LiveJournal<\/a>.\u00a0 Today it’s FaceBook<\/a>, but there are already signs that it might have peaked.\u00a0 Tomorrow it will be someone else, possibly FourSquare<\/a>, or likely Google Plus<\/a>.\u00a0 The \u201chot spot\u201d changes at lighting pace.\u00a0 You need to move just as fast.<\/p>\n 3) The toys change too<\/strong><\/p>\n In addition to new places on the web, you will need to keep track of new ways to access the web.\u00a0 PCs aren’t exactly dying as much you might hear, but iToys are going to become more and more frequent.\u00a0 These new technologies more and more often include in their embedded software ways for businesses to interact with customers without having to go through a web browser.<\/p>\n
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\nJump on in!\u00a0 But do it right.<\/strong><\/p>\n