JetBlue's Corporate Social Media Structure
3 New Realities Of Social Media

What Is The New Reality In Social Media?

In the 80's companies adopted computers, word processors, spreadsheets, and accounting systems. Partly fueled by personal computer adoption company productivity exploded and we had the boom of the 1990's.

Social media came of age in the early 90's though as a community we were not calling forums social media.

The web, the dot.com boom, the rise of search engines, Googles flight from Yahoo!, Overture, the dot.com bust all signaled the end of building companies based on market share and building companies built on profitability.

The next stage of social media started with the development of RSS, blogs, wikis and podcasts. This development was much more personal, even built on celebrity status, think Scoble, Calacanis and Armstong.

Then came the rise of social networks, think match.com, Yahoo! personals, Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn and Facebook. Even today there's something of a divide between the under 50 year olds and over 50 year olds on social networking. Though the gap is closing.

Next Twitter, and the web's focus switched from desktops and laptops to mobile. Foursquare and location based social media are now.

Yet blogging may be seeing something of a revival. Need numbers to prove this, but in my own circle of friends more friends are returning to their blogs while others abandon them.

What's today's new reality in social media, is two way communications still relevant, or have advertisers and frankly old time social media celebrities adopted push strategies?

Or are we just going through a learning process? Was the last election a wake up call for industry that social media is important? When you see the U.s. Presidential candidates debating on YouTube you have to sit up and notice what's happening in society around you. I think companies got the message, but maybe using advertising push strategies within social networks because that what marketers understand works in other media. And over time if that technique doesn't work, companies learn that engagement is also important.

What do you think, what's the new reality of social media?

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