Today's Ypulse Guest Post is from Will Lenzen. Will is part of Gen Y having earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities in Strategic Communications: Advertising in 2007. His focus is now in interactive advertising and social media. You can find out more about Will here. If you work in youth media or marketing and have an idea for a Ypulse Guest, post just email me.

Getting Off The Social Networking Bandwagon

Facebook and MySpace are pretty much household names now, no news there. If at least one family member doesn't have a profile on one or both of these sites, they have heard of the social sovereigns at least. What's happening a lot lately is that the social networking bandwagon has been increasing in numbers pretty steadily, begging the question is it really worth it to a company?

Mashable posted an article featuring seven brand name social networks. Disney is on there, as well as Pepsi, MTV and others. All of the sites aren't meant for Generation Y, but let's take Pepsi for example. Pepsi has a wide range of consumers, and one of the hardest to communicate to is Gen Y. Instead of allocating money and talent to building a Pepsi-branded social site, why wouldn't they take advantage of what's out there already? Facebook and MySpace. With the ever-increasing number of members, I think creating subtly branded fan pages, apps, games, and content for users to share and talk about would be more effective. After all, Gen Y doesn't want to feel advertised to; they want to feel like they found something worth sharing with their friends.

Then there are social gaming sites, like FlowPlay's new ourWorld, that are targeted to tweens. This is another opportunity to subtly get a brand in the minds of younger generations. How? By creating content for the space. I think there's more bang from the buck this way. What do you think?

Posted by anastasia