Social Networking

    
The social networking aspects of the internet become increasingly clear as groups of like minded thinkers converge or emerge as nodes in cyberspace.  

The newest technology changes constantly, with sites bringing deeper integration and questions arise about the boundaries between personal and public lives.   Corporations battle for the minds of consumers through clever campaigns designed to manipulate the search engines or bypass them altogether, in order to reach as wide an audience as possible.

Salsa Cube

The salsa cube incident illustrates a contemporary battle for product placement in the mass awareness.  Campaigns battle to capture their place in pop culture and trends emerge.  A perfect example is today’s fast rising story on Reddit.com a social networking site that caters to a mixture of left leaning and libertarian minded people, with roots in the computer technology industry.

The story appears simple enough, and has the request of When someone does a Google Images search for "Salsa Cube", I want them to find this picture. Please help me in this noble quest.”   Under the guise of heroic action and presenting an opportunity for people to add their part to the internet lexicon, the community is mobilized to provide an impressive array of backlinks to support the seo efforts of the site owner.   Fans of salsa cubes everywhere will probably see the image when they use image search for quite some time as a result of this campaign.  

The tasty and deliciously appetizing or potentially horrific salsa cube will be remembered long after the wave of taco fanaticism fades and a lasting impression will be made on the internet.  Later this zesty campaign for the taste buds of america's food consumers will be revitalized and engineered in new ways, perhaps revived every couple of months until no one cares about salsa cubes and is instead embroiled in whatever the new message of the day to infiltrate the social networks is.

(picture not shown, we'll save you the surprise of seeing the salsa cube in its own natural light)

Technology and Art

The merger of technology and art in advanced advertising campaigns is demonstrated on a daily basis.   The presentation itself may be linked to the page directly or just posted in the hopes that it generates conversation.   The actual message may be slipped into the comments, accurately or otherwise.  In this case at least one reference to Beck’s beer and a link managed to slip into the thought stream.  Whether this was deliberate, opportunism or a deliberate hijacking is unknown, but there is no question that savvy media users will continue to subtly influence the modern consciousness that is produced by today’s social networks.

Iron Man

Higher profile actions are also submitted to major and minor social networks.  Yesterday’s example is an attempt by Oracle to capitalize on its Iron Man campaign.   Appearing on Reddit with the headline “larry ellison wishes he was tony stark" is a link to a high tech promotion by Larry Ellison (CEO of Oracle) and his advertising team to promote cloud computing.  The search Giant Google has already indexed at least six pages of results with that title as the meme spreads.  If you would like to see this admittedly slick, but somewhat slow site, click Oracle.

Promotions of this nature can spin wildly if they catch the right eye, but more often than not they are carefully constructed social network awareness campaigns.  Dreamed up by marketers and promoted by teams of people who specialize in internet awareness campaigns and search engine optimization, or SEO.   These campaigns take advantage of the way in which search companies evaluate a sites worth based on how interconnected the site is with the rest of the web.  Authority is established by the sites that show inbound links.   

Much of this is unnoticed by the casual user, who just consumes whatever rises to the top of the search engines.   Advertisers work to produce content which is entertaining and then relentlessly work to get the ball rolling through social networking and media sites, as well as employing other strategies.    

Iron Man’s own technology is advanced in hardware, but social networking is easy prey to the newest technology advances in social engineering and advanced sociological techniques as they apply to the internet.