Social Media – The Game Changing Beast!
I received an invitation to a conference the other day and the mailer described the conference as an event where stakeholders will be gathering to discuss the future of “a trend that is being described as the biggest thing to happen post the Industrial Revolution”. And guess what that trend was – Social Media! For days I had been thinking about the magnitude of the impact that social media has had on the lives of individuals, businesses, institutions, almost everything – and finally this descriptor very aptly summed up what I had been trying to fathom and articulate for a while!
Traditional boundaries and rules of communication are quickly changing as social media rages like wild fire and challenges all pre-set norms both in the personal and the business communications space. Increasing penetration of the internet across the globe, along with the proliferation of mobile connectivity and applications, is fueling the growth of social media and making it an all-pervasive phenomenon that allows people to be connected and exchange ideas, opinions, experiences, likes, dislikes, anything/anytime/anywhere. The statistics for social media usage are quite mind-boggling too. According to www.insidefacebook.com, there are 21,655 companies on Facebook and 550 million Facebook users worldwide – and this number is only growing at breakneck speed! The last I checked, Twitter was estimated to have 200 million users, generating 110 million tweets a day and handling over 800,000 search queries per day
A few years back the advent of weblogs revolutionized the way people expressed their opinions and thoughts on the World Wide Web – making everyone hail it as the new media which defied the limitations of time and space that encumbered traditional media content. Now blogs are almost passé and is looked at as “old” social media that does not have the speed, virality, agility that micro-media such as Twitter or social networking tools such as Facebook have. If blogs were considered fast and viral once upon a time, the new forms of social media are getting exponentially faster, better, much more viral, connecting people across the globe through networks that are unimaginable. To add to it all, the social media frenzy is now catching up with people of all ages, genders, nationalities, professions, and is not limited to the young, tech savvy upper crust only anymore. It is allowing the free-flow expression of pure, unsolicited and undiluted opinions and sentiments of all social media participants from diverse backgrounds on products, brands, services, companies, ideas, governments, regimes, public figures, just about anything and everything possible!
This outpouring of individual expressions through a very fluid and easy to use medium has resulted in rapidly fuelling and shaping public opinion on myriad topics/issues. A single conversation or comment can suddenly gain momentum and gather a lot of supporters or detractors on the way. This can make or mar the future of whatever/whoever is the subject of conversation within no time. Look at what happened in Egypt. The uprising in Egypt is an example of how social media stoked the fire of rebellion and helped mobilize thousands of people that eventually brought down the ruling government. Social media was not the cause of the rebellion but the enabler that brought thousands of people together and of course the rest of what happened in that region is now history. The point to recognize here is that if social media has the power to bring down governments, it can certainly also be proactively used by entities to influence peoples’ choices during the democratic process of elections and help form governments too! The same principle applies to influencing consumer choices for anything that they need to select/choose/buy.
There is no longer any doubt that the volatile opinion of the masses can be easily shaped and influenced through even seemingly very innocuous social media comments and can have completely unpredictable, far-reaching, positive or negative effects on the fate of the entity being discussed. Hence marketers, PR professionals, governments, non-profit and for-profits organizations, are all sitting up and trying to get their arms around this relatively new yet un-suppressible phenomenon that seems to be permeating every aspect of our lives. Given the ubiquitous and seemingly omnipotent nature of this medium, organizations and institutions both in the private and public sector are scrambling to tame this beast and preempt damage to reputation, avert crises situations, and save their fame and fortune. The smarter organizations are however going several steps ahead and looking at social media as a tremendous window of opportunity. They are harnessing the power of social media to not only avert the dangers that the medium poses, but also to proactively influence stakeholders to consciously make affirmative choices for what these organizations have to offer over that of their competitors’ offerings, grow the loyalty base, grow the influencer/advocates base, create amplifiers in social media who will carry positive messages about them and help enhance mindshare, reputation, support, sales, revenue, etc.
EmPower has been doing pioneering work in social media listening and research over the last several years. While some of our clients are still only in the social media listening phase and want us to simply monitor chatter about them, other more advanced user clients regularly engage us to do much more involved research studies for them using our proprietary social media methodologies and frameworks that we have created over time. Such research studies include but are not limited to perception and reputation tracking, KOL/KIB identification, market segmentation, market opportunity assessment, purchase intent determination, brand tracking, etc. With the increasing awareness and recognition of the threat and opportunity that this medium presents, we are seeing a growing number of organizations across industry sectors jumping on to the social media research bandwagon and coming to us for help. They are realizing that there is no turning ones back to this beast – the only choice left is to confront it and make the most of what it has to offer! Are YOU there yet?
- By Shoma Bakre
