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of really interesting people and she could envision long-lasting friendships
with them. The feeling of loneliness was over for good. Within her first two
months in Paris, she had become a real Parisian.
The world of online social networks is a reality of our society today.
Apart from being a world where people “virtually” congregate, it is also fast
becoming a bridge connecting our “real” and the “virtual” existence. It is
also a world where the boundaries between the sources of influence of con-
sumers are stretched. Online social networks have challenged the way human
beings relate to one another and particularly the way they form perceptions,
ideas, opinions and viewpoints when it comes to issues that they're interested
in. This includes products and services, and is a real challenge for luxury
brands.
Social networks are places where people are drawn together by a shared
interest, which they discuss, share and also vent. They are online communi-
ties that serve the core purposes of congregating, engaging, educating and
influencing people of varying age groups, social status, educational back-
grounds, religious beliefs, cultural orientations and sexual preferences. These
parties are often brought together because of that innate human need to con-
nect with other human beings, particularly those that share common inter-
ests, values and passions.
To go for a more scientific definition, according to Wikipedia, “a social net-
work is a social structure made of nodes - which are generally individuals or
organizations - that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency,
such as values, visions, ideas, financial exchange, friends, kinship, dislikes, con-
flicts, trade, web links, sexual relations, disease transmission or airline routes.
The resulting structures are quite complex”. Like blogs, online social networks
belong to the broader phenomenon of the social web, which also includes chat
rooms, discussion platforms, virtual worlds and other user-to-user communities.
Social networks are a worldwide phenomenon and are becoming prolific
with the likes of iVillage, MySpace, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn,
Asian Avenue and Diamond Lounge as the most adopted, while others like
Qzone, Rose Beauty and Mixi have become references in online congrega-
tion in China and Japan. As I write, there are more than 175 million active
monthly users on Facebook and more than 125 million on MySpace. Twitter,
which had drawn over 17 million users by April 2009, is currently growing
at a phenomenal rate of more than 1,000 percent. You may however be sur-
prised to know that the social networks with the highest number of monthly
users in the world are not in the US but in China. The Chinese social network-
ing website QQ has more than 300 million monthly users while the Qzone com-
munity has attracted over 200 million monthly users, representing 50 percent
more than the number of Internet users in China (see Figure 3.12). In Japan,
the use of online social networks has also been on a constant rise. The social
website Mixi, which has more than 10 million monthly users, has become an
important destination for the digital media-obsessed Japanese. South Korea
