Yesterday the Washington Post Online featured an article about Barak Obama's footprint on the social network sites. Sen. Obama has the big two ( Facebook and MySpace ) more than covered, but has also established more than a toe-hold presence on various racial/culturally-themed networks. Jose Antonio Vargas writes:
And as of Friday, he's the first candidate to have profiles on BlackPlanet.com and MiGente.com, popular soc-nets in the black and Latino communities, and also on newer soc-nets such as AsianAve.com (for Asian Americans) and GLEE.com ("GLEE" stands for "Gay, Lesbian and Everyone Else").
How much is too much?
At what point is an individual's online presence just advertisement, and how much is genuine expression, leveraging the power of the community in question? Is "just advertisement" okay for individual's profiles? Businesses savvy and not-so-much alike have leveraged the potential ROI these networks afford, should individuals?
Different points of view, here. Traditional marketing and advertising thought is to saturate the market to a point of providing maximum exposure, while not diluting the brand; use the power of very-minimal-cost exposure opportunities to grow the brand. Is this a violation of any network's stated purpose? Is it a breach of what the network's community "expects" as far as authenticity goes? Also, all of the networks mentioned above are businesses, run for a profit. It's probably not a stretch to say that even if use this way stretches the intent of the use agreement ( I don't know that it does ) or sidesteps the feeling of a particular community of members ( again, maybe, maybe not )... these networks are still benefiting traffic wise ( and thus dollar-wise ) from Obama's presence.
At what point is it a wiser decision to utilize the power of one community, rather than attempting to develop a coherent presence on many of them? Do the "rules" of traditional marketing apply here, where so many of them don't in other aspects of social marketing?
