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Business Trends - Go International or Go Broke and Advertising Via Social Networks
The gradual shift of business operations and activities being dominated by major corporations and companies to the hands of the small business owners has seen the increase in competition for potential clients within the national scene. This is a particular problem for developed countries, because of the saturation of the market with more product and service providers than ever before, and where there is competition, there are no surprises that the bigger and more well-established businesses have the advantage.
Businesses make or break on their ability to innovate, and the way around competition in the domestic market has given business operators the incentive to look further for business opportunities. While there are countries with an established culture of fusing Western and Eastern trends (such as Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong), there is actually a largely untapped market that is craving for all the luxuries that developed countries enjoy.
China, India and Korea have built their recent economic success around their ability to pick up the jobs that others don't want to do. As the average citizen begins to realize the rewards of their hard work, they are starting to splurge on the fruits of their labour. No where is this more obvious than China and Korea, with the numbers of tourists from these two Asian countries starting to rival those of the traditional Asian tourists of Japan and Taiwan.
Nowadays it is not uncommon to see a software application or website that supports more than one language. The modern design of software and web applications facilitate the process of internationalization, making it almost as easy to carry out as changing the look and feel of the software or website; but the commodity of language services are expensive and still rather inaccessible to the small business community.
The cost of making your products and services available to potential markets around the world, versus the increasing pressure of domestic competition you make the choice!
Advertising via social networks
This is an interesting aspect of business operations that has only recently emerged on the popularity of social networking websites and applications such as blogs, MSN messenger, MySpace and Facebook. Ironically, even as technology continues to evolve at an unbelievable pace, one of the most traditional forms of advertisement (word of mouth) is being revived by the technological revolution.
Social networks are an incredible way / approach / method to spread and disseminate information. This is largely due to the fact that social networks are partly built on inferential links, i.e. A is friends with B, and B is friends with C; therefore A is also friends with C. Therefore, to spread the message to both B and C, A would only need to contact one person. If we imagine that each person in the social network also has multiple social networks, it essentially becomes an exponentially powered link.
Although also prone to spamming (much like email), social networks are being developed to be much more sophisticated than emails, allowing the configuration of individual links to allow different levels of access to each individual. In addition, other types of multimedia contents can also be shared, and are gathered together in one place to allow easy access. MySpace is now being used by musicians to let fans preview their latest videos, tracks, see the latest concert and tour dates, etc.
Businesses are also jumping into the social networking circles. Applications such as Squidoo and Joomla are putting social networking applications at the fingertips of everyday people with no IT or programming experience. The advent of Google AdSense and AdWord also reflect the trend of businesses advertising through Internet traffic and social networks.
Explore your business social network today, and find out how far it will take your business.