It is well said "Content is king but marketing is queen, and the queen rules the household". Or we can say "Great Content Markets Itself". This is very true for Social Media. It is all about Word of Mouth. You have to be very communicative and interactive with your networks to keep them engaged with you. They will stay tuned and remain hooked with you unless and until they will find value in the engagements with you.
Its presence in a business today is increasing day by day. According to Forrester Research, it will be rising exponentially by 2014. Here is how "Social Media" being quoted by some of the professionals in Online Media industry. It is the future of everything on Web. There will be social networking sites for everything you could imagine. Instead of this, stumble upon mentality, it will focus and more demographically delineated. It will still be wide open but it will have an organized chaos mentality to it.
Where Time, Network, and Trust (TNT) intersects.
The Wild, Wild West... it's certainly evolving by the minute though. Refinement is coming and several players will emerge as leaders of their particular genres; genre being social, and professional. It's here to stay, no doubt. Jump on board or get run over! To individuals, it is friendship and communication. To groups with a message, it is a way to get the message out. To businesses is it a way to obtain exposure and establish credibility. All together, this is so powerful that it will continue to grow and become major use of the internet.
At times remarkable because of its ease of use and ability to connect to a single person or masses, and at times scary because of its immenseness. It is not really a new concept. Today we see many different forums and communities for virtually any human need, personality and interest. The one common trait for all of the successful communities (past to present) are that they built value to sustain and then monetize their members.
SM is marketing nirvana for those that are truly invested in managing customer relationships. The long term focus on Relationship Marketing is back in vogue and illustrates that corporate focus needs to be on a 12-36 month timeline, not a 3 month ROI on tactical ad campaigns. Really depends if the organization has the appetite to go that long.
It is a tool for broadening conversation and creating community that, if used intelligently, can be valuable for sharing of knowledge and building relationships. It is easy, enjoyable, effective and economical. It seems like a day will come when social networking tools will become fee-based.
SM is Business. It's the direction that all media is moving. It's not a fad or a temporary thing. In 2008 we called it Web 2.0; early 2009 we called it Social Media. Now, in late 2009 people are referring to it as Media and Advertising. It's a platform for having a (meaningful) conversation, in my opinion, through which one may be able to build the authority and influence.
LinkedIn is the business meeting, FB is the hallway conversation, and Twitter is the cocktail party. It's a big honking' volume. Customers share recommendations (good and bad) with their friends. Humans have always wanted to be heard and to connect. It is taking over as the best way to get the word out and target your message. I've found it very productive already. Work is flying in!
Social Media is an Opportunity and a Blessing too, a tool for sharing, collaborating and marketing.
It is a communication channel to converse and engage directly with your customers, friends, fans, opponents, decision-makers, and thought-leaders. It is literally changing the way individuals, businesses, governments, etc communicate. The one to one marketing model is over. It is now many to many, there is no turning back.
Some neural or negative quotes are as:
Social media is expanding our ability to connect and share corporate as well as personal information in ways that weren't available in the past. This presents new challenges and opportunities, but we cannot forget that authenticity and quality are still much more important than quantity when it comes to true and viable business relationships.
It will ultimately fail since the number of "people" who want to know you for selfish reasons far out-weighs the number of people you know or will ever want to know you for "personal" reasons. This ratio dictates the security platforms that surround all SM's, thus draining their lifeblood (connectivity) before they even get started!
When you put thoughts or ads in newspaper, it might reach 1 Lac people and might interest 5K people (5%). But on FB, it will reach approx. 5 crores and will interest only 5 Lac (1%). SM may give reach to mass audience but it makes difficult for business to pull right kind of people to turn them into customers compare to other media.
Other media allow you to reach targeted audience, whereas it lets you to connect with the entire pool of users in any network. Finding customers through SM is like finding water in desert. It is a try to filter the 10% valuable information vs. 90% waffle. Just like a black hole that sucks you in.
Last but not the least:
The problem is that so many people still operate in a Web 2.0 mindset! Those days are gone. The two worlds are no longer independent of each other. The relationships we make in real life carry over into the virtual realm, and vice-versa. It's a marriage and the strength of each will sustain the other. Social Media isn't going anywhere. In fact, there is only growth in the future.
