R.Lex's Dream Factory

Social Networking Website

Murray and Waller defined social networking website as a kind of virtual communities which allows people to connect and interact with others(Social networking goes abroad. International Educator; Murray and Waller, 2007). In other words, they are the virtual places where people can create profiles of their own and build a personal relationship(network) with other users. As I mentioned before, Facebook and Myspace would be the ones that are well known to the U.S.

Although the Internet itself can be easily seen as a bolder-less global medium, each social networking website has certain cultures that are shared by the members just like any communities would so. For example, Facebook users tend to be more affluent, with its users skewing towards households earning over $60,000 whereas Myspace users skew toward lower income levels(quantcast.com). Moreover, even though Facebook and Myspace are the main social networking websites that dominate in the U.S, there are hundreds of different social networking websites all over the world that would have different characteristics and cultures.For next a couple of weeks, I will try to introduce and compare some of the different social networking websites in different countries, mainly in the U.S and Korea : Facebook/Myspace(the U.S) and Cyworld(Korea).

According to the statistic data from Quantcast.com, Facebook’s monthly traffic was estimated at 65.5 million as of January 2009 whereas Myspace has a monthly traffic of 67.9 million. These numbers represent rank 8 and 9 on traffic size in U.S, respectively. As much as these websites have grown tremendously in popularity and become a social phenomenon, the potential of these social networking websites as advertising and marketing tools has been widely recognized by both academic researchers and advertisers. From this point of view, I will research on what these social networking websites mean to advertisers and marketers and how advertisers and marketers should understand and use them.
In addition, since there are so many different social networking websites out there, we would like to know the differences of those different websites and try to predict the usage and trends in next generation. All of the social networking websites provide essentially same function such as text messaging, photo/video sharing, discussion boards and so forth, yet each social networking website has certain characteristics that differentiate one with others. Therefore, I intend to ask questions on people’s perception toward the social networking websites, who uses and how/why people use them, the usages and effectiveness for an advertising perspective, and the differences in different countries.