Social Media Evolution

After reading Chapter 1: "The Origins of Social Media," in The New Influencers, pp. 1-14, it is hard to determine if social media is a net positive or negative for companies. Such examples as AOL and Sony cited in the article are evidence of how quickly negative media can be propagated throughout the social media channels of the internet. Most often, most media published by the public via internet takes a negative form. Most people won’t sit done and take the time to blog about how great the customer service was for Dell, but if they had one poor experience, they will make sure that everyone knows about it, such as the AOL example. It is up to the individual companies to utilize social media and the internet for positive gains.

As my outlook to this week’s learning, I wanted to understand how social media can evolve into a useful tool for businesses. The way social media and marketing can be taken to the next level is to market at the very early stages of inception. This is referred to as the bottom up strategy in "Making the Transition to the Social Web," in Marketing to the Social Web,. If a company has 1 million followers, they can pose the question, “would you purchase this new product”, and obtain real time feedback. This benefit could potentially save companies millions of dollars and avoid wasted time developing products that consumers would not be interested in.

My biggest take away is the pyramid effect social marketing can have. One person blogs about an issue, which is communicated to their 10 friends, which is then communicated to each of their 10 friends, and so on. Anyone can see how quickly this can continue to spiral. Therefore, the internet and social media is quickly becoming a vast and connected web. Companies can obviously see the power of this. Compared to television or radio, where you may only reach a few million people spending millions of dollars, social media can allow companies to reach billions of people, and more shockingly, do it with such ease and at low costs.