Social Media

My first reaction of social media was not much. I thought of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc. I have to agree with Boris’ statement about what Shipley defined about social media (“the place on the web where people can make the public conversation.”) This to me sums up social media. Social media is a great networking tool and an amazing way to stay in contact with friends and family.

There is much more to social media though. For this course though, I believe that social media marketing is a definitive key in creating innovative ideas for the project. Social media marketing has three vital points to its definition. The first is to create some sort of buzz about one’s company. The next is to build your company by gaining fans, so there is some is a base for the support of the company. Last is to have online conversation where the customer is respected. Social media is about the people, not about the logos or webpage’s. It is what the customer ultimately wants and will gain satisfaction in building a community for itself.

In today’s world, companies are asking themselves how they can effectively use these social media tools to reach their audiences. For me when I think about this I think you have to go back to the basics of defining the objective and goals of the company. When strategizing for social media it is important to gain some sort of ground about your customer. If one thinks about what the company wants then when will they reach the customer’s need? The answer is they will reach some, but they will not fulfill the potential of maximizing the social media to its’ greatest.

After reading some facts about social media I have came to the conclusion that social media is a great tool to use, but it has to be use in a smart way or else it can hurt one’s company. Social media is very open and free to everyone around the world. It takes one person to not be satisfied with how something is done about company which can be a negative towards a company and the one person can use its own social media to pass the negativity to the rest of the world. On the other hand social media is a great tool to have, as it involves social interaction via the web, and can be very easy to gain market segments when a company wants to increase its market.