DISQUS

hi Sukhjit!

we're glad you found out about Radar and look forward to know what you think of our service.

of course, please feel free to get in touch with me (ian@tinypictures.us) or anyone else on the team if you have questions. btw, we have some pretty significant changes in the works coming very soon.

i will send you a Radar request and follow you on Twitter.

thanks

ian

http://radar.net/people/ianmtl

Thank you so much for posting this. What a great read!

2009 is going to be very interesting for anyone in the Social Media space, both desktop and mobile, and as someone in this space building a social media service (Radar http://radar.net), it's really interesting to see what the experts think will happen in 2009.

Obviously the economic climate is problematic for everyone, but when it bounces back there's a handful companies (the smarter ones who launched with a real business model) that will surface to the top and claim the space.

Great post and definitely highlights some of the serious challenges marketers are having with social media marketing. It's an interesting time to be a marketer because we're experiencing a fundamental change in strategy.

This change starts with social media's promise to deliver engagement (beyond the click), but engagement and reach don't work well together. To obtain engagement, brands need to offer something compelling to the right consumer at the right time, not to as many people as possible.

Social media and engagement are about building brand-consumer relationships, and that's completely game changing. Once the relationship is established, brands must make the commitment to foster it, working to build a stronger and stronger bond. Until brands get this, they'll have a hard time seeing the value of social media marketing.

This sentence from your post caught my attention: "The best solution for brand marketing on social networks combines a media buy for reach with a compelling application to provide branded engagement."

Yes, brands should create awareness within social media services like Facebook, but I have hard time believing that all brands will jump on the application bandwagon, and more importantly I question the ability for brands to create a compelling application.

I'm not convinced branded applications are the solution. There needs to be a more accessible and democratic solution for brands to leverage social media marketing. There is bound to be services out there who will make that happen.

Just my two cents...

Thanks

we're in San Francisco and we're not sure if submissions are closed...