Over the past few years Social sites have grown from college networks and groups of friends into a major marketing avenue. Marketing and Advertising groups and companies saw the potential for these social networks and latched on with tenacity. Once Facebook was open to all of the public it became a venue for audience specific targeted marketing with minimal effort.
Social Media allows for targeting marketing, increased brand awareness, improved public relations and un-edited customer feedback among many other positives. This is why many movie production companies forgo designing custom websites and instead opt to create Community Pages on Facebook. The micro-blogging of Twitter saw rapid development and immediately became a new marketing and advertising tool. The US Government saw the potential for twitter as a database and has since started archiving all of twitter. These major properties along with blogs, photo-sharing, video-sharing and many others that spring up daily are all a part of our society. While advertising and marketing can utilize these as tools it is far to easy for them to not see the holistic picture of social media.
Social Media is more than a tool, it is a culture, it is the social adaptation of our ever evolving Globalization of culture. The youngest to use Twitter is 6 (as of post) and the oldest to use Oldest Person on Facebook is 103. Everyone is joining the cloud. Anyone who has not joined some form of social network as an active participant by this point is what Anthropologists call a ‘Lagger.’ By refusing to adopt what is now considered a standard of society is inherently rejecting social conventions and thereby becoming societal outcast.
The opposite side of this is the adopter or participant who fails to adhere to the conventions and standard cultural conventions of utilizing Social Media, the participant will find that they are neglected or even avoided based on their behavior. Ex: Using other applications to post nonsensical information to twitter or facebook and never utilizing their own personal voice. When a social construct becomes saturated with participants who violate the standards of behavior and participation the construct is often abandoned in pursuit of the next construct. Myspace was the first large-scale social media construct but it was too open to cultural violation and was subsequently abandoned by the majority in favor of a construct with more control; Facebook. Now with Twitter continuing to rise and the multitude of changes to Facebook in favor of more open social networking and more potential for marketing avenues (rumors abound of paying for access) Facebook seems to well be on the decline.
Everybody Wants to Rule the world
Social Media standing out Social Media developed as a means for participants to share knowledge, experiences, ‘triumphs & trivialities’ with anyone and everyone. It is a means of participating in society with minimal effort. It allows individuals to directly interact with larger social clusters and constructs that they never would have the opportunity to participate in otherwise.Everyone wants to Rule the World and social media is a means for the individual to feel recognized within a larger social construct.
While Social Media is now an integral tool for marketing and advertising it should be kept in a holistic perspective. Social Media is not a synonym for marketing or advertising but participation. Social media is an interaction between individuals, groups and cultural constructs. If a construct is utilized solely for advertising or marketing it will fail and if enough failures clog up the construct the construct will be abandoned. Effective use of social media for social marketing and social advertising is possible through a balance of information, participation and reciprocation. The key to utilizing any social media is to remember it is SOCIAL and that means participation within the culture not just propagation of a solitary agenda. Social Media is sociable.
