Does WOM or Social Network Marketing Create Agency?
January 28th, 2009 by Jeremy Costin in Business Law, Communications, Information Technology | 4 Comments »
We are now near the end of January, and I realize it has been a little while since my last post. Before leaving LexisNexis, I prepared a proposal, formatted as a white paper, for a position specializing in information management. At the same time, I wrote a post here on how online social networking technology impacts marketing strategy. I’m looking into writing on the subject, and how it intersects with law.
Social networking technology is just one aspect of Web 2.0, the paradigm that was encapsulated and named only four-and-a-half years ago by IT publisher and guru Tim O’Reilly. As such, social networking should be considered as one of many related technologies. In fact, it shouldn’t be seen as a technology at all, but as an interaction platform, a way both of enabling interaction between participant users and also of nurturing those interactions. And like any nurturing mother, the platform controller infuses the nurturing with whatever flavour suits it.
O’Reilly summed up Web 2.0 as “the move [by business] to the Internet as a platform.” Seeing the Internet as a platform instead of as a mess of often unrelated technologies is key to understanding both the interconnectedness of Web 2.0 and the resultant online social networking phenomena. The various technologies always were related, but this was not apparent as they (e-mail, web pages, newsgroups, chat, etc.) manifested independently. The interconnectedness is now apparent. It is part of the user experience, not just the underlying technology.
Users are now able to connect their web toys in uncountable ways. From wired broadband to wi-fi hotspots to 3G iPhones, BlackBerries, and other smartphones, to the variety of social networking platforms (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn), cloud computing web-based applications (a Google app world?), and user-generated content (YouTube, etc.), connectivity is the emergent über-paradigm. Connectivity is the defining factor of this post-industrial information age.
I’ll climb down from the soapbox now, put down the megaphone, doff my cyber-evangelist’s cloak…
What does this mean to business, and to the law that affects business?




