Social media are media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media supports the human need for social interaction, using Internet- and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) pages.

The recent social media trends have shown that more and more educators are using social media to not only teach but mostly to learn.

Watch the phenomenon of Social Media in this Youtube Video.

Why is social media so strong and popular?

Social Media is getting very strong and popular because of the following reasons:

• Social Media fulfills the following basic human needs

1. Significance

2. Certainty

3. Variety

4. Connection and love

• Easy to use applications
• Availability to all walks of life
• Real time networking and connectivity
• On demand information

Who are the big guns?

Even though there are plenty of social media websites that exist in Web 2.0, I am listing out some of the big guns here.

• Social Networks

* Facebook

* Linked-in

• Micro-blogging

* Twitter

• Video Promotion

* Youtube

• Blogs

* Blogger

* Wordpress

What are the numbers?

The social media rules the web now-a-days and it’s going to be continued in the forthcoming years.

According to the recent social media trends survey statistics:

• Facebook has 250 million users
• Twitter has 100 million users
• 100 million Youtube videos are watched daily
• Twitter has achieved 5 million monthly growth of close to 1,000 %
• Linked-in has over 10 million users
• 112.8 million Blogs around the web

Push vs Pull:

The below table list out the major push and pulls of Social Media

Push	Pull
People hate being sold People don’t like being interrupted Lack of trust from consumers Advertising dollars may not bring in the results	Direct WOM marketing It is permission centric Build customers’ loyalty Decrease in marketing expenses

What can businesses do?

In this critical market situation business people must understand the shift in marketing. They can stay in touch with their customers / partners / stake holders through social media to maximize their ROI by doing the following activities effectively.

• Start by listening
• Create social media profiles
• Participate in conversation
• Google Alerts - Monitor anything in the public domain
• Have employees register through Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
• Social networking acceptable use policy
• Make a commitment to social media

Does it really work?

Yes of course it really works well both for an individual and business to build their online brand or corporate identity. If someone wants to write about your business they can write reviews that may help you to gain a good reputation online. But keep in mind that enforcement may not work. In this competitive circumstance you must have to control your brand / corporate identity by doing passive monitoring, auditing and sampling. If you fail to do so, your competitors may spoil your reputation as social media is an open playground anybody can come and play their spoilsport.

What are the risks involved?

Though social media yields your business lots of benefits, of course there are various risk factors needs to be considered. Some of them are:

• Data and Privacy protection
• Data leaks, data breaches or reputational damage

Why should I get up to speed with social media?

Each and every individual must have to make the best use of Social Media just because:

• They are here to stay
• Your parents, your teachers, your community partners, your students and your colleagues are using them
• Connect now to profit later
• Networking with your community because they are talking about you and you need to know
• Facilitate communications and marketing

What can I do now to get started?

Are you really got curious now? Then what are you waiting for? If you want to know more about social media just go and Google yourself the topic that covers social media in education or else if you’re much aware of the power of social media just do the following things.

• Create your Facebook account and set your settings to private
• Create your Twitter account and follow your friends
• Create your LinkedIn account and set up your professional profile
• Create your Youtube account and start promoting your videos

So, what’s next?

• Social Media is not going away. It remains till the web exist
• Business has faced the challenges in the past, but it wasn’t as easy
• Electronic data is continuing to grow
• Challenges around compliance will increase

Point to remember

“Dude, you can’t take something off the Internet. That’s like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.”

Once your business data, IP, press releases, client information and other is out there, it is out there.

Tags: SMM, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Web 2.0

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 at 4:55 am and is filed under Social Media, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.