When a handful of employees at former internet marketing company eUniverse signed up for Friendster, one of the earliest social networking sites launched in 2002, they quickly realised a couple of things. One was that using the web to maintain and foster relationships was fun and easy. Another was that they could do a lot more than what they were seeing.

Within ten furious days of set-up, the first version of MySpace was ready to roll out to the world. To avoid the typical start-up growing pains, an entire infrastructure of technical expertise, bandwidth, server capacity, finance and human resources were installed from the start. This allowed the team to quickly bring their creation to life, and it wasn’t long before the MySpace phenomenon soared into the stratosphere to lead the way for social networking sites.

MySpace offered a few features the masses hadn’t experienced, such as mood emoticons to depict the profile owner’s current disposition, profiles for musicians that allow them to easily upload their own music and, most importantly, oodles of customisation tools to ensure that each user’s page could be unique enough to convey a sense of who you are and what you are into.  

Today, MySpace has almost 250 million registered users around the world, and Facebook has grown immensely alongside MySpace to become the second largest social networking site on the Net, and with around 124 million users, it has proven that there’s plenty of room at the top in the online world. 

For researchers, numbers like these also represent a virtual goldmine of highly-focused market insight. “The communities on social sites represent a tremendous opportunity for researchers to become involved in, participate in, observe and analyse thousands of conversations,” says Steve Garton, executive director Synovate Media. 

“The point here is that the consumer is increasingly in charge of what media and sites they choose to use. The market research industry has to reach out to where consumers are, and seek their opinions about brands, lifestyle, and all the issues that matter to them. This is a fundamental shift from interviews to conversations.”

Of course, harnessing the collective output and gleaning the right information from the right places isn’t so easy. But forcing yourself in front of them isn’t the answer either (and it wouldn’t work) – what is important is putting control in the hands of the user, and letting them be part of something out of their own choosing. 

“Savvy marketers have woken up to the fact that they cannot just buy time with the consumer,” says Garton. “They have to create time, via communities, competitions that social site members can vote for, events staged in virtual worlds and using the power of virtual worlds to use the brand in novel ways.”

Planet 2.0
Thanks to your trusty mobile phone, by your side wherever you go, your virtual life is far from chained to your desktop computer. Twitter is one of several interactive social services that provides on-the-fly networking, allowing you to send personal updates via SMS text message, instant messaging or online. So, whether you’re about to step onto a plane, sunbathe on a tropical beach or just decide what to have for dinner, all your contacts will know exactly what you’re up to.

In 2008, Twitter helped a young journalism student from the US after he was arrested in Egypt at an anti-government protest. Updating his status from his mobile phone, he was able to summon his Twitter friends to his aid, and was released the next day when his college hired a lawyer for him.

But don’t be fooled into thinking that sites like Twitter are just for Americans – Twitter itself has its highest usage in Tokyo, well above the next highest usage city of San Francisco. And during the terrorist attack on Mumbai in November, locals used Twitter to keep a continuous flow of information coming out of the city – often beating the media networks on breaking news.

A recent Synovate study of attitudes and online behaviours across 17 markets shows that social networks are very much a global phenomenon. The study found that over 49% of respondents in The Netherlands were members of social networking sites, putting them at the top of the list, but followed closely by United Arab Emirates at 46% and Canada at 44%, with the US at 40%.

The good news for marketers is that site sponsors do get noticed by social networkers, as do advertisements, and according to the study they have a particularly strong impact in several key markets such the US, (where 66% notice). But again, this isn’t limited to the US, and respondents also scored highly in Russia, Germany, Serbia, Indonesia, Poland and South Africa – a massively diverse range that’s about as global as it gets. 

With all the pieces out on the board, researchers have the frenetic task of putting the puzzle together. “This is increasingly the age of consumer 2.0, which implies the need for research 2.0,” says Garton. “We can and do follow consumers to their websites of choice to engage them in research studies. We have used mobile phones to conduct web-based surveys – even on their Blackberry. We can set up chat rooms where a researcher seeds the conversation with questions. One area which I believe will grow more in the future is website usability testing online, to improve a client’s web offerings, content, navigation and ‘stickiness’.”

The whole practice relies on one major factor of course, and that is that people continue to maintain an active virtual existence – something that seems extremely likely given the sheer number of people that love it.

But why do people love it so much? What is so appealing about creating an online identity and sharing it with the rest of the world?

“Just look at YouTube’s strapline ‘Broadcast yourself’ and you get an idea,” says Garton. “The internet and certainly social media are about expressing yourself, maybe not to everyone but at least to circles of friends and acquaintances who you have met on- or offline. Younger people are driven to feel part of a group, so as long as we have young people in the world, social media will continue to flourish.”