Virtual communities come to play with the popularization of the Internet. They were born as online spaces to satisfy their members’ needs: information sharing, offer support, debate and socialize in an informal manner.

Nowadays, they are also a valuable tool from the business point of view (i.e. corporative blogs) because they enable and improve the internal communication within the organization, and establish a closer relationship with their clients and providers. But not only…many companies have discovered other advantage: being able to anonymously analyze how these communities (and their members) evolve and develop overtime, their likes and dislikes, their habits and uses. So handling this information, they can after introducing new devices and products adapted to this particular market.

Virtual worlds like Second life or communities like Del.icio.us, MySpace or YouTube are open spaces not only to promote products, and so get ahead to their respective competence, but also a perfect environment to interact and know, just as any other member, the marketing patterns of this targeted audience, say young people 18-40 years old and engaged with new technologies.

This online experience can be also transferred to RSS marketing. Publishing your news by RSS, people who is interested in our products and services will subscribe to our feeds. We will not know their names or email addresses but we will be able to discover their likes.

Say that I subscribe myself to a recipe’s blog. Then I could also check in my RSS reader how many people are subscribed to this particular blog. And even to what more blogs about recipes (or not) have are they subscribed to, and so on. So I will discover on what else is interested people who is interested in cooking.

With the new social networks, it becomes a game to know what is interesting to other people like me, or any other group. So many new worlds to be explored by marketers... Exciting, isn't it?