If you're selling to consumers under 30 and none of the above makes sense to you, you may be in serious trouble. The broadband generation is increasingly more plugged into PCs than TVs and is hooked on social networking, but advertisers are slow to adapt, even if the smart money has begun to cop on.

Bebo is the most popular social networking website in Ireland with an incredible 600,000 users, almost all of them under 30, out of a total worldwide audience of 25 million. It recently attracted the attention of Benchmark Capital, famous for being an early backer of Ebay and, closer to home, Setanta. Former Esat chief executive and Benchmark partner Barry Maloney took up a seat on the board of Bebo last week after Benchmark invested 15m in the company.

While corporations spend massive amounts sponsoring youth events like music festivals, the targeting of this massive online audience (MySpace has over 82 million users at the time of writing) has been almost reluctant.

The irony is that the concept of social networks, apart from communication, is one of promotion. You build your profile, brand yourself, and then spread that brand across the network, adding 'friends' and creating awareness about your existence. The more 'friends' or contacts you have, the more desirable a product you are, and demand for your 'adds' increases. On MySpace, the dominant brand in social networking, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the content from the advertising.

MySpace was established by a Californian graduate, Tom Anderson, in 2003 and quickly became musicdriven. Bands would set up a profile, upload a few songs and then wait for an audience. Music lovers, club promoters, independent record labels, music photographers, merchandisers and clothing stores quickly followed and make up a large amount of MySpace's population.

The site now has its own record label and runs 'secret shows' with big names. Next Wednesday in The Village at Wexford Street in Dublin sees Myfestival, a gig organised by MySpace featuring Irish bands (Director, The Marshals, Pinky) that are doing particularly well on the site.

But now the advertisers are coming. The Fox Network is leading the way on MySpace . . . hardly surprising considering Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation bought MySpace last year for $580m. There are ads everywhere for Family Guy and other Fox TV shows;

they also have their own profiles, part of Fox's 'viral marketing' strategy. The company Deep Focus was hired by HBO to promote its programme, Entourage, on MySpace. BBC and RTE presenters have their own pages.

But the challenge for advertisers is to adopt a smarter approach for social networks. Static advertising simply will not work. The audience is cynical and almost hostile to the traditional.

Integrated and interactive promotions are key.

To promote its new car, the Element, Honda set up a MySpace page for it, encouraging people who drove the car to add themselves as 'friends'.

Then Honda launched a competition for MySpace users to create 'wallpaper' (the background to a profile page), and posted samples from the finalists on the Element's page (www. myspace. com/honda element). At the time of writing, the Element has 44,990 'friends'.