Social networking sites
Social networking sites are applications that enable
users to connect by creating personal information
profiles, inviting friends and colleagues to have
access to those profiles, and sending e-mails and
instant messages between each other. These per-
sonal profiles can include any type of information,
including photos, video, audio files, and blogs. Ac-
cording to Wikipedia, the largest social networking
sites are U.S.-based Facebook (initially founded by
Mark Zuckerberg to stay in touch with his fellow
students from Harvard University) and MySpace
(with 1,500 employees and more than 250 million
registered users). Social networking sites are of such
high popularity, specifically among younger Internetusers, that the term ‘‘Facebook addict’’ has been
included in the Urban Dictionary, a collaborative
project focused on developing a slang dictionary
for the English language. Several companies are
already using social networking sites to support
the creation of brand communities (Muniz &
O’Guinn, 2001) or for marketing research in the
context of netnography (Kozinets, 2002). To pro-
mote the movie ‘‘Fred Claus,’’ a 2007 Christmas
comedy film, Warner Brothers created a Facebook
profile via which visitors could watch trailers, down-
load graphics, and play games. Likewise, the Adidas
custom soccer community on MySpace allows visi-
tors to associate themselves with one of two brands
of elite soccer cleats produced by the German sports
apparel manufacturer, and to access product re-
views and information on professional soccer play-
ers who play using ‘‘their’’shoes. Some firms even go
one step further and use Facebook as a distribution
channel. Consider U.S.-based florist 1-800-Flower-
s.com, which offers a widget on Facebook called‘‘Gimme Love’’ whereby users can send ‘‘virtual
bouquets’’ to friends or, with a click of the mouse,
be directly transferred to the company’s website to
send real flowers.