Business

Social Media Portal Landscape - Business

Background

Organisations found in the Business area of the Social Media Portal (SMP) Landscape cover a broad area; from venture capitalist, to publisher, to content provider to agencies and consultancies that provide social media marketing services. These array of businesses play an integral role in the overall social media landscape; helping to shape the direction, technology and growth of social networks globally.

Companies featured in the Business section on SMP in broad terms are enablers. They can enable companies to flourish by providing financial backing, they enable brands to connect with the target audience (and vice versa), they enable to people to express themselves by publishing and providing content and so on.

An example of a business that would be included in this section would be Google Inc. Google Inc. is a business that owns, operates, enables and provides technology for social media properties. Its individual services are listed in their respective areas, for example: Google search is listed in Search, Google Talk in Instant Messenger, Jaiku and Dodgeball in Mobile, YouTube and Google Video in UGC and Orkut in Community.

Growth

The social web is growing at a rapid pace, and many social start-ups have launched not because they have an innovative proposition, but rather to get funding and sell as soon as possible to a large publisher or similar company. This has naturally led to a raised profile of venture capitalists and investors, and even the launch of online communities dedicated to helping start-ups find investment.

Social media has seen phenomenal growth particularly since 2007, which has in turn spawned an immeasurable number of social media related businesses. One, if not the, biggest areas of growth in this area has been the incredible amount of traditional public relations (PR), marketing and advertising agencies that have suddenly created digital departments. Almost daily there are reports in trade press of an agency opening or extending digital capability to cater for growing demand from clients to service the social media space.

These agencies and consultancies provide services to brands and organisations that don?t have the knowledge, capability and expertise of reaching this audience themselves. Services provided may range from seeing video content into user generated content (UGC) areas, to managing a blog or Twitter account on behalf of the client to reaching influential people on blogs and social networks.

In a broader sense, these businesses also provide consultancy on how brands can build a thorough social media strategy. The goal is to build and maintain a two-way dialogue with their audience through blog relations, social networking, social booking, rich media content such as video and images through to viral marketing campaigns.

The benefits of adding your business to SMP

Connect with potential stakeholders, media and researchers raising your visibility that want to connect with businesses like yours
Communicate your core offerings / properties to your target audience
Help people discover who you are and what you do
Differentiate your approach, products, service and/or technology from your competitors
Update your stakeholders and target audiences with case studies, events, press releases and/or whitepapers
Submit news scoops through SMP to be considered for social media news
Share your expertise through opinion and thought leadership articles published on the SMP site reaching your audiences
List other assets of your business that relate to the social media Landscape and demonstrate the other relationships that it has

Are you involved in the social media space?

Become part of the Landscape by adding your Business.