So, social media. It can be pretty confusing, right? After all, one person tells you one thing about it while another person tells you the complete opposite not 5 minutes later. And then the day after, you have someone else telling you it’s something in-between the previous two explanations! No wonder social media is so confusing. So what does it mean?
To be honest, social media is exactly what you want it to be. You want it to be a way of finding cool and interesting websites that you would never have found before? Sign up to Stumbleupon. You want to know what blogs are popular? Get yourself a Technorati account. History of all the comments you’ve ever left? Backtype. And the list goes on.
For me, however, the true meaning of social media can be found in the way that people who would normally be business competitors offer support, knowledge and different expertise to those who need it.
I’ll give you an example. On my Twitter account, I’m probably connected to around 40 or so people from the PR and copywriting industry, whether it’s through me following them or them following me (or both, even). Now, in the “normal” business world, they would be competitors so you’d think the last thing we would want to do is help the other out.
Yet instead, Twitter sees any request for help or advice answered almost immediately, and often with information that would offer a distinct advantage if kept private. Now to me, that’s social media at its finest.
Yes, we’re all in business and we all want to succeed, but gone is the “at all costs” attitude of the last decade and beyond. With the Internet opening up a whole new world of commerce and potential customers, there really is enough to go round for everyone. And people are realizing that.
Not only that, but people are also encouraging others to succeed and offering up the tools with which to push for that success. You can’t get much more of a truer meaning of social than that, media or otherwise. Perhaps we should get the leaders of the world into social media? After all, they could use all the help they can get.
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I think the reason for the above is that the social media truly facilitates the collaborative abilities of individuals. As collaboration becomes easier, people share knowledge based on the assumption that ‘We’ is more powerful than ‘I’. I’m dubious as to whether the current uptake of social media is as high as reported by some analysts, however you are right; these platforms do offer a fantastic opportunity to collaborate and to provide solutions the likes of which would be completely unfeasible within even the largest organisations. Unfortunately, it is my opinion that at present there is still a reluctance to undertake such collaborative efforts because it makes profiting from the final product difficult. As collaboration really takes off though, organisations will be tasked with devising new means of profiting from the collaborative outcomes. I imagine that whoever devises an effective collaboration profit strategy first will create a significant competitive advantage for themselves in the Age of Social Media.
Speaking of Backtype. Why do my comments appear on your account? Something’s really fishy here.
Regards, George
George Cozma´s last blog post..Mean Toys for Bad Boys – Black Hat Tools on Steroids
@ The Lovable Rogue (great name by the way!)
Interesting points you raise. I agree with your view that social media hasn’t taken off with as many people as the sites might have us believe – I’ve yet to see an overall figure with user numbers for everyone. I also feel that social media is the online equivalent to the consumer electronics field – the early adopters will “get it” while everyone else will wait until the price comes down (in social media’s case, when the amount to choose from has settled).
With regards a collaborative agreement, again I agree. If companies and/or individuals can truly work together to bring a product, service or similar to market and accept collaboration allows more chance of success than going it alone, then we may finally see social media reach its undoubted potential.
Thanks for reading and sharing your views, appreciate it.
@ George – Interesting – I noticed that too. I wonder if it’s something to do with your friend list at BackType – you know, the same as you see other comments on Twitter, FriendFeed, etc? Definitely worth looking into.
@George, @Danny
Danny, you had claimed greyhatzone.com’s comments, which is why they showed up on your profile. We’ve changed it for you.
Thanks, although I’m unsure how I had claimed the comments – perhaps you could explain further?
@Danny
When you were adding URLs on http://www.backtype.com/home/claim (this was previously on http://www.backtype.com/home/account), you added grehatzone.com in your list of Websites. That’s why all those comments were attributed to you.
Ahh, thanks, that makes sense – I thought you had to update sites you left comments on – consider me feeling suitably foolish…