Social Networks Helps Businesses Bypass Traditional Mass Media to Build Brands

Like it or not, retailers who want to find where their shoppers are hiding these days need to start looking in the blogosphere. Vaynerchuck is one of the few who sees, and has successfully exploited, the business potential of blogging. He believes that bizblogging is America’s new gold rush because it allows a company to build a brand and position itself in the marketplace without the need for other mass media.

“Social business is the future of our society,” Vaynerchuck says. “You need to get talked about in social networks.” Again, most of us hear "yadda yadda bling blog."

What “social business” means, according Vaynerchuk, is that you want to use blogging to become the company that people want to hang out with. This is not such a foreign concept. Starbucks, Borders, and Apple are brick-and-mortar companies that people like to hang out with. The constant presence of people in their stores is proof of that.

When looking for retail companies that are successfully working this new concept of “social business” in the online world, though, there are no real standouts. Most businesses are using their blogs to push a marketing message, which makes their presence in the blogosphere nothing more than another commercial to be ignored. Business blogging best practices do exist, but the companies employing them don’t happen to be members of the U.S. retail industry.

Can retail businesses succeed in the future without social networking skills? Theoretically, yes. “New media” is just another outlet which doesn’t have to be part of anybody’s mix. Howard Schulz built the global Starbucks chain without any help from television advertising, for example.

But being dubbed “the first” or “the best” is always a good business strategy, and both of those positions are still available for some creative retail bizblogger. The retailers that snatch up the first-best positions in the blogosphere will likely be catapulted to iconic status faster than a viral YouTube video. It doesn’t take a social media expert to know how quickly presence can translate into profit in cyberspace, and that’s a virtual reality that any retailer can get excited about.

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