Value Based Management – Home Assignment Number 1

“Pick up a company, and determine how the trends, here, the social networking, affects the business of this company, and then, how this company can impact on this business”

Company chosen : Olympique de Marseille SASP

Mainly since 2006, the wide world of the Internet welcomed a new protagonist: Social Networking.
Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Viadeo etc etc, belong to a new kind of tools, which one are actually revolutionizing the communication, the marketing, the companies’ strategy, in one word, the world.

According to Erik Qualman, “social networking changed the way we live and are redefining human interaction and business.” That’s what we’ll try to find out later.

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Here a graph showing the history of social networking over the last years (source: 6 degrees)

To illustrate the impact of social networking on a special business, let’s see the football world, and a big club in France, l’Olympique de Marseille.

Social networkings are now a strong tool for every single football club in Europe. Why? Because it is a cheap marketing and communication tool, which does not induce large advertisements campaigns, or spending hundreds of millions € on a well known player.

Big clubs (For example, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Liverpool, Manchester Utd, Chelsea etc) have a Facebook page and a Twitter, and they are using them to communicate with their fans.
They found out that there was an opportunity by developing this new trend, and that it could be a very efficient tool.

Football has the power to gather and link the people all over the world, and now, people can share, discuss, but also criticize or insult their favorites clubs and players through social networking. It’s a revolution that the large business of football has to keep in mind, and adapt themselves to this new trend.

Facebook is an obvious place for football fans to share opinions.