12 Historical Social Media (Marketing) Moments

1. Amazon Review Section May 15th 1997*
One of the antecedents to ‘Web 2.0’ people were given the facilities to produce content online, in the form of reviews for products. This little application would change the way that people would buy products and the way that marketers communicated their products.

2. Friendster March 22 2002
The launch of the first of the big social networking sites, the site was modelled on dating sites and lost its popularity when they started banning music bands and fictional characters from creating profiles. Myspace encouraged bands to create music and the fans moved with the decision.

3. Technorati 20th November 2002
Technorati launched and helped to create a metric that goes beyond traditional measure of effectiveness of media channels (reach measures). They help to measured the influence of a media channel (blogs) through how many people were speaking about a person ideas (Authority), a very BIG step in the right direction.

4. Mysace Fox Interactive Media pays $580 million for Myspace July 16th 2005
Booyah, Social Media is worth money! ... or is it?

5. The first viral Youtube clip - Evolution of Dance April 06 2006


6. Jaffe Juice holds Curry to ransom September 7th 2006
Jaffe Juice holds Adam Currie to ransom for not giving any link love to Jaffe after Adam appeared on his show and made no mention of the episode in his own podcast. Only Joseph Jaffe could peform such a stunt and get away with it. Read story here

7. Transmedia Planning: Idea Propagation October 3rd 2006
Not really about the content (which is an amazing piece) but through the propagation of the message, he published the idea on his blog in the form of a post and it spread across the internet like wildfire!
October 3rd 2006

8. Dove Evolution Viral wins Cannes Ocotber 7th 2006
Dove Evolution helped to show that social media was valued by the old advertising heads picking up the Grand Prix Cyber Lion.

9. The first flog:Fake McDonalds Monopoly winners blogOctober 31st 2006
One of the first cases of abuse of Social Media by a Advertising Agency. The interesting thing was not that marketers would do such a thing but the punishment that was dealt to McDonalds at the hands of real bloggers. People now have more power to make your mistakes visible.

10. Dell Ideastorm launches February 16th 2007
Dell capatalised on the power of masses to help innovate and develop new ideas for Dell products. Social Media is now seen to change the research and development stage for businesses. The product was a creation of Salesforce who created the platform for themselves first with Salesforces Ideas

11. The Age of Conversation March 22nd 2007
The post between Drew McLellen and Gavin Heaton which was the catalyst for the book The Age of Conversation. Taking the Dell Idea one step further and created a product from the collective content of social media participants.

12. Power 150 ranking moves to Ad Age August 7th 2007
Todd And Power 150 moves to AdAge and boasts over 700 blogs now, a huge step in connecting the Marketing Community.


Anyone got any other great moments to add?

13. Time Magazine announces YOU (Social Media) as the 2006 Person of the Year December 13th 2006
Thanks for the hat tip Mike Kuhl

*May 15th 1997 was the launch date for Amazon, not the date that the review section was created.