Social Networking Is One of the Most

Social networking is one of the most popular trends within the new emerging digital age. Businesses have long been in tune with the power of social networking, and how harnessing it can provide effective marketing results with a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing campaigns. Advertising online has been severely impacted by the evolution of social networking as we know it today. In order to understand the history of social networking within a business context, it is important to explore its timeline of important events.

After 1990, there were a number of events which took place that strengthened the evolution of social networking. In 1991, the service Gopher was launched as the first system for searching and retrieving documents and web pages via the internet. It was an easy to use site that began the age of the search engine. Then, in 1992 the first version of a blog was published in Berners-Lee's site "What's New?" This constituted one of the first self-published blog-like content that would later be so popular in modern social networking.

Next, the creation and launch of Slashdot in 1997 continued to evolve the construction of the blog. Essentially, it was the first blog to allow comments to be written and posted by users (Timeline 2007). Fourth, the site SixDegrees.com launched in 1997 and began to establish the type of interconnected nature of social networking as it stands today. The sit ran under the motto of "no person is separated by more than six degrees from another" (Nickson 2009).

This was a pioneer in how companies began to offer services that would allow users to connect with other users and create purely online social networks. According to the research, this "was one of the very first to allow its users to create profiles, invite friends, organize groups, and surf other user profiles," (Nickson 2009). After cam Ryze.com in 2001. This was the brainchild of Adrian Scott, the founder who operated in San Francisco.

It was the first social networking site looking to link people through the internet and linked professionals in a number of various businesses, focused on working especially with entrepreneurs who were just starting out. Then, in 2002, the creation of Friendster in 2002 established what we would consider the more modern style of social networking site. The site promoted feature called the "circle of friends (wherein the pathways connecting to people are displayed)" (Nickson 2009).

The site was so popular, it boasted three million users by 2003, and eventually became the modern for later sites like Facebook and Myspace. These six historical events had a huge impact on how companies marketed their products and services through social networking platforms. First, the establishment of Gopher would help create a forum for companies to later use to structure simple ads that were tailored to individual search requests.

This is now a huge form of cheap and effective advertising that was unthought-of before the creation of a modern search engine. Secondly, the creation of blogs helped establish how users were going to produce their own generated content. This allowed companies to target individual users for advertising at lower price points, than focusing on major sites run by commercial companies. Third, the launch of Slashdot helped allow for greater user participation in blogs.

This opened up the potential for customers to review products and services in an online forum, forcing companies to be more accountable for their production and customer service practices. The creation of SixDegrees.com was based on the web of contacts model, which focused on "encouraging members to bring more people into the fold," (Nickson 2009). This created a context where companies could reach out to users through commonly shared contacts.

Word of mouth marketing once again took a center position as more users could share their opinions through their web of contacts, and therefore generate positive or negative assumptions to their friends and families regarding particular products and services. Finally, Friendster helped open the door for sites like LinkedIn, which was released later in 2003. This also helped generate user networks that could be targeted in masse as a group for business advertising through social media facets.

The original strategies for advertising over the internet were surprisingly similar to traditional marketing campaigns. Essentially, the same strategies used for print ads were just adopted into an online context. Hotwire launched in October of 1994 and contained advertisements from companies like AT&T, Sprint, MCI, Volvo (Word Data 1997). Ad banners across website pages were bought and sold.