Social media is the new age of the internet. I fully believe that if you do not have a social media presence today, then you are at the same position of not having a web page in the 90's.
Twitter, while abused by
idiots tweeting about what they ate for lunch, has really turned into the new
news aggregation service. RSS and news readers are a thing of the past.
News sources (businesses, people, forums, etc.) push out content
to subscribers who follow them. The ideal content to push would be
whatever is relevant to your world, out to people who have
interest in it. Typically it's a headline with a shortened URL.
This shows up in your subscribers timelines and they read through it
though the day or in real time, and follow links of their interests. More
so, people who are not subscribers will use this as one of the primary methods
to investigate you as a source of relevant content to their
interests. With one click, they can see what kind of content you are
pushing out. Is it relevant forum posts to drive users there?
Maybe sale items, maybe a sale item of the day. Maybe it's
commentary about the topic the source is an expert it. Either way, it's a blurb of data, typically with a short URL link, that is pushed to subscribers. My tweet for this post would be "My opinion about social media's importance and value as it relates to business and web communities: http://t.co/7FuFjcxb"
Facebook has done
something amazing. Something I didn’t think was possible. Ignore
all the games and waste of time bullshit on it. When you work for a
large corporation, there is usually digital infrastructure, like
maybe an Exchange environment, where everyone's contact information is
aggregated and pushed out so that everyone is up to date. Calendars are
shared. Events created and people invited. They respond if they are
coming or not and calendaring reflects it automatically. Groups are
created to help organize users and communication of subsets of data.
Large organizations would struggle without this. As a user, I would
struggle without these things. What Facebook has done, is create this
for people's personal lives.
Shut up about privacy
stuff, I'll get to that in my use case. That's more for personal concerns
than business anyway… I’ll touch on that in my personal use case below.
Facebook creates an
environment to help people share their contact info, their data, their
calendaring. What is more amazing is that Facebook has captured the
"non-computer" type people; people who are not currently engaged with
the web; people who don’t play online anything. It has even captured a
large portion of people who simply have phones. It's become the software
that ties people's personal lives together instead of their professional lives.
Information, video, pictures… It’s all shared with practically a single
click via this outlet.
As a business, having a
page on Facebook will allow people to like you.
Great. The more people like you,
the more Facebook will recommend your page to other people. It really is viral in that aspect. I like your page. My friends, who have liked similar things as
I, suddenly have this page recommended.
When they like it, the same happens to their friends. Now the page has an audience. Same as twitter, you can push out whatever
content you see fit and it hits your target audience, and via the magic of
social networking, becomes visible to people who are not necessarily a part of your
business’s network. It attracts new
people to you. With a single click,
users are able to see if you are an outlet for information that is of value to
them. It allows them to see the value
in your data without them committing to becoming part of your community and
trying to see if it is of value. More
importantly, it integrates your community and/or data into their social lives. Your events are pushed to their personal
calendars. Your headlines and topics are
noticed as they show up in people’s day to day activity instead of just when
they actively participate.
Professionally, I am an
HL7 Medical Interface specialist and enterprise architect. I dabble
in laboratory medical data, person identity management, and
data transfer, analysis, and application of medical data. I use social
media both professionally and personally.
With twitter, I subscribe to new sources to help me keep up in my
industry. I subscribe to web communities
that help identify latest trends in software development I work with. I subscribe to individuals who are leaders
and visionaries in my industry. I also
follow my friends, who are the aforementioned demographic of “what I just ate”
but I follow them out of friendship.
Facebook is more personal than professional. I’m part of groups and pages of web
communities I’m in. I read Facebook and
it gives me an idea of what is happening today in my world, my friend’s worlds,
and the web communities I’m in. I might
not get to the forums daily, but I catch topics I want to know about. I get event invites that with one click, I
respond to the creator and they know that I’m attending or not. My Facebook calendar overlay my Google and
work calendars. It’s where all my
personal events invites come from. My
professional calendar invites come to my work email.
As for personal privacy
concerns, I know that anything I put into a public forum like Facebook or Twitter
is public record. This is where us as
users need to draw the line of privacy, not within the application. If you do not want something public, don’t put
it on the web. That being said, I put a
large portion of my life in the web and have it all public. Photos, Facebook, Twitter. I’m very transparent. And as for employers using this against
people… Well I believe you should live
your life being the person you want to be.
I do. I like to have fun, maybe a
little more than others. I probably do
things that some employers would use against me as an applicant. I believe I’m a commodity and not a
job. There are many jobs out there, but
not many people who are good at them. I
feel my skills and professionalism speak for themselves and if there was
something on Facebook that caused me not to be selected, then I really don’t want
to work there.
If personal privacy is a
concern, then I would recommend using social media more as an aggregation
service instead of pushing your personal content out. With both Facebook and Twitter, you can subscribe
to things of value, both professionally and personally, and have content and
more pushed to you. And you never even
have to post a thing.
More so, are you going to work at
having your social media filled only with drunk club pictures? Or are you going to work at having it filled
with your professional accolades and commentary that reflect who you are? I could go into this deeper, but this starts
to become a case of balancing your life and actions and not about social media
which was the point of this overly wordy commentary. This point is that if you are active in
social media; leverage it instead of being a victim to it.
Here's some word art
that is not only entertaining, but gives a nice perspective on stats.
This is the market share
to target. I cannot express that enough to anyone in business today.
