Over the last few years social media became a large part in our daily routines, the belief that “it’s a hype, it will blow over and in a few years no one even remembers it existed” is now totally gone and I think most people realize social media and social networks are here to stay. MySpace, Twitter, Gowalla, Foursquare, LinkedIn and Facebook, the latter obviously leading the pack followed by countless others, became much more than a website for social engagement with your friends, relatives, colleagues, people you lost contact with and found via these sites or even meet new people.

All kinds of social networks are evolving to a place (notice that I don’t say website) where people start of their social lives each day at breakfast or even before, and finish it again at night just before they go to sleep. The best example of this is Facebook. A social engagement platform where anyone who exists can view, participate and actually just exist in a digital form. Where they mention doing their normal life things, commenting on others doing their normal life things, and have micro conversations as if you just passed by each other and just had the time to say ‘Hi’. Everyone can be part of ‘The Facebook’ and I’m starting to think that those of us who are not engaged or even (still) look at social media as if it were the devil itself and believe that their lives are in danger if they should ever make a profile and put in their real name online are missing out.

As the focus of users tends to shift towards what is happening on social networks (the things that others contribute) and start from there to interact with other people, I feel that they become more and more the common reference of our social interactions. Even when we’re out on the street, people meet up, have a drink at a bar or go to a party, we tend to fall back to the social networks. People talk about what others on those networks did or didn’t do, the pictures/videos and all the other stuff that’s posted on these social networks on a regular base in their conversations. They take pictures of every moment in their lives and a few years back those pictures would sit on their own computer, maybe sent to their friends on IM services like MSN, AIM, ICQ, Google Talk, … or email. But the extent of who got to take a look at those pictures was relatively small. Now everyone can see what anyone else in his or her network (and beyond) is doing. They are up to date on the lives of others going at any given moment or where they are (and what they are doing) at any point in time e.g. Gowalla, Foursquare, Facebook Places, tweets with location details, …

With the amount of mobile devices with social network capabilities growing, becoming less expensive and more interactive, a greater percentage of users have one of them combined with more/better availability of 3G/4G and cheaper data plans users are more likely to contribute to those social networks even when on the road. Conversations at a bar or just when people hang out can and often will at some point refer to something that’s been said or done on some social network and in more than one occasion someone checks up on that on their mobile device to check on what is happening or verify what others said.
Obviously you might think that is a tech-people/ early adopter/ freak thing but this is far from the truth, everyone does it. Social media are everywhere, with countless applications on web, desktop or mobile they are so entangled in our lives that it’s about as unthinkable as living without computers, Internet or even electricity anymore and what the future will bring is as always unsure, but in the next few years Social networks will thrive and I’m very excited to see what people come up with to work with/extend or create entirely new things that are social media based in the future.

Originated as an endpoint or separate channel social networks might be becoming our Ground Zero, the starting point, the end point and maybe even the everything in between of our social lives, so integrated in our lives that maybe we couldn’t even live without them. The social networks are very much a part of our social lives, is it slave to us or are we slave to them?

In the ‘web world’ today Social media is a big thing. A lot of people use it in one or more ways and as it seems we are more and more evolving into a world where social media is becoming a very important aspect of our daily lives. At this point many companies are already exploring or using it.

So what can social media mean for a company? Is it only meant for the big enterprises or can smaller companies take advantage of it to?

Well it’s not a yes/no answer question, it depends on what you want from it. If your company deals with consumer products it’s viable or even essential to have a pick in some sort of social media. (Just to clarify: consumer products can also be service based) For branding and advertising it’s always a good idea to use social media and you can reach massive amounts of users (possible buyers of your products) in an effective way. Also customer support can be very fast via those channels. But a company has to dedicate resources to do so, if they fail it would mean advertising in a negative way.

Marketers need to understand that the branding of their company is slipping more and more out of their hands with social media. It’s a matter of following what is said by the common user and reacting on that in an appropriate way. Or hinting to the public what can be. Users are getting smarter and more and more have an opinion (e.g. me writing this blog post ) that they dare to publish via the social media channels. There is no way of knowing in advance how a certain campaign is going to evolve when users start to comment and criticize it. But if you have your customers in your hand social media can mean massive publicity with minimal efforts to keep it going as the ‘user’ does it for you. Companies need to change their way of thinking and move from a push method where a marketer controls the brand to an interaction model with the crowd.

If your company is into B2B, things become a bit cloudy. B2B products don’t need to reach a massive amount of users (otherwise you would be selling a consumer product) as most of them have nothing to do with the product itself but you want to reach your potential clients which are other companies, but they are still people who could be using various social media platforms and interact with other potential customers for your B2B product(s). In those cases opening a Facebook page can be less effective than for consumer based products but LinkedIn is always useful to network digitally with other corporate people. (the latter also goes for B2C companies of course). But things are evolving… A lot of networking today is also done via social media websites like Facebook, twitter etc. where the line between personal and professional lives seem to fade to nothing. People talk to their friends but also their associates, colleagues or even their competitors thru the same channels. This means, maybe that Facebook page could be useful after all.

Social media seems fairly specially for smaller businesses that don’t have the big to spend on being on top of the latest evolutions advertisement and marketing. But even those companies should look into how this could benefit them because websites like YouTube(2005), Facebook(2007) , LinkedIn(2003) and Twitter(2006) to name a few are only a couple of years old but booming big. And as for all things evolving over the last few years there were pro and cons for ‘social media’ some saying it’s only a hype and it will die when the first excitement is over. If that is going to happen, it’s definitely not going to happen soon and personally I doubt it ever will.
Social media is here and here to stay but I do believe it will evolve in one way or the other and in a few years the digital landscape will look totally different from now.

But that’s also a reason why I love it so much ..