Social Media! This is it..

Social media is the variety of internet applications which allows people from all over the world to interact with each other through online conversations. For the first time in the history everyone can produce and share the information with a group of friends or community. 

The accessibility of the Internet and the availability of social media platform allow everyone to play a central role in online discussions. Anyone can be a journalist, a Photographer, a film-maker or an actor. Anyone can setup a business online. Anyone can be a leader of a community. The democratization of social media offers people a chance to express their personal opinions in regard to everyone and everything. Today people read online news from experts, witnesses and victims. Consumers of media can become active producers of contents. Social media has challenged the PR (Public Relations) profession. We can now be a direct relationship with our audience.

We can see Social Media as a revolution. Because now-a-days, 80% of the companies use LinkedIn social networking site for employee recruitment. 50% of mobile internet traffic in the UK is for Face book. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. Wikipedia has over 15 million articles. In social media, a word of mouth is a world of mouth.

By definition Social media is “a group of Internet based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of web 2.0, and that allow for the creation and exchange of user generated content.” 

Effects Of Social Media

1. In order to grow your business neatly, one main thing is that you must be ready to conncet with the customers all the time. What we give is what we take. So, if we update useful information on your website, a customer who is interested might respond to your postand rest is on our side to satisfy the customer. 

If we are not ready for updating the customer’s interest, he might lose faith. This results in damaging the business.

2. The social networking site like facebook, twitter etc are not that much effective for building brand awareness. Because, until unless the business has been long enough to be remembered. All these ads through social media mainly work for attracting customers to increase sales by giving good customer service. This is one of the most obvious disadvantages of social networking sites.

3. Social media effects teenage a lot. If you ask a college student, How much time a day you spend in social networking? Obviously the answer is, “Oh! So much, I am constantly texting friends through facebook on my blackberry. I can’t stop.” And if you ask, “Do you think that facebook effect your grades?” Seriously, they will say yes. Because they can’t even spend few seconds without texting their friends even though they are in library. 

With social media, bad news also spreads much faster and it stays there. Information is far less controllable.

Mobile Social Media & Education

Mobile social media has made way in our social lives and even in the world of business, but furthermore mobile social media has proved to be an invaluable tool for educational institutions abroad.  Mobile social networking has enabled colleges, university's and even secondary schools to post course content for students online.  Through these web portals students can access information pertaining to their studies 24/7 wherever they are and connect with classmates.  Students are even able to email professors with questions and get in contact with student advisement services without ever making an appointment.  Social Networking Belongs in Schools

Social networking perhaps started around an educational structure.  Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of the popular social networking site Facebook developed the site to enable students to connect.  He began by creating a website called Course Match which allowed students to see who else was enrolled in the same courses as they were.  The website became extremely popular and with some added features and a new domain name, the website services became available to post-secondary institutions abroad. Mark Zuckerberg on why he created Course Math here!

Sheridan College has also implemented a social networking site for its students.  Access Sheridan and SLATE have both been put into place to keep students on top of course content, events at school and the administrative side of their studies.  Students are able to complete full courses online, chat with individuals in their classes and even check tuition invoices all online 24/7.  As a student, I can say that these added features has made my life much easier! Recently my computer crashed and with exams approaching I went into panic mode as I no longer had any notes to study from.  I then realized that many of my profs had posted information online and with a few clicks I was able to download fundamental course content.  Without this service I would have spent hours searching textbooks for information for my exam review and I would have been extremely stressed out.  

Mobile Media is Exploding

As we know today online marketing is the biggest platform on the planet. But mobile marketing is so huge. Best example is Apple; it is now recognized as a Mobile Company. It has the I Phone and I Pad. What most people don’t know is that it has also begun its own Mobile advertising platform as well. Apple made a formal bid to purchase Admob.com for $600million! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7E5PosTG2U&feature=related

 Apple has a 45-day grace period to secure that deal and they let the 45 days passed. Then Google came in and overbid it on Apple for $750 Million. What I meant to say is Google bought admob.com, not Apple.

 There are currently approximately 1.8 billion Internet users on the planet which is a huge number. There are currently approximately 5 billion mobile users. People don’t walk around with the Pc’s in their pocket. Now-a-days, there are Pc’s in Mobile Phones. People walk around with cell phones and they won’t leave home without them. 

With a huge number of Mobile users in which everybody has cell phone in their pocket, putting an ad on the cell phone is like putting your hands in people’s pockets literally. That’s how powerful the mobile marketing is.

Raise Of Mobile Tech

According to the International Programs Center, U.S. Census Bureau, the total population of the world, projected to 12/15/10 at 23:38 UTC (EST+5) is 6,888,033,337. 

Of this number, 5 Billion of them carry Cell Phones. Almost everyone from everywhere is using cell phones. Much like print, radio, TV, and Internet... Mobile phones have evolved into a huge advertising platform.

Look at where we came from. Now, look at where we are going! As of 2010, according to Wikipedia, over 45 million people in the U.S. alone have “Smart Phones”. Today with 5 Billion mobile users worldwide, mobile marketing is bigger than Radio, TV, and Internet. Cost of a 30-Second ad on TV’s or other media is about some millions. What else could you buy for that? Get a mobile ad for pennies on the dollar and reach as many people or more.

Mobile Evolution

Mobile technology is changing the way we think about advertising. International surveys say, Over 94% of all text messages are read by the recipient. 1/3 of North and South Americans signed up for mobile alerts indicate that such services impact their decision to go into stores. Every time business people use their texts to inform customers about events or sales, store traffic greatly increases. 

Mobile technology in social media and the future

The Future

In the future, mobile technology will become more advanced and third party software will bring the social network to a website. People will use social media to communicate collaboratively to produce content. Security issues and social feature like sharing with facebook, twitter, and yahoo will more concern. Only the existing social network will live in the future and people will not have more than two or three ids. It will hard for new social network to make a place in reliable social network. May be due to the security reasons, students will not allow to use mobile technology to access to their social media or instant messaging while on campus because due to the social media majority of information steal while on accessing the network. In that way, students will gain a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of social media like facebook, twitter, MySpace etc. Mobile technology will be cheaper and brands will spend more on web pages and all these things will be accomplish through mobile technology. Mobile technology like Iphone and smart phones will be the central mode of attraction of people towards social media. People will use different secure way to communicate with other people in any other location. With the increase in technology, mobile applications will become predominant and will start to dominate the social network. Only the profile of those people will be left who don’t see very often and live a long way. In the future, social media will not reliable as we will come to know how people will respond with a local- based social networking like proximity dating. The matching through using social media by using mobile technology will no longer reliable.

Web 3.0 is coming up and is expected to be as revolutionary as Web 2.0. I wonder what will be the definition of social media in future and for how long that will be continuously dominate?

http://rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2008/09/the_past_presen.html

Mobile technology in social media and the present

The Present

Mobile technology in present time is advanced and is not location which was the drawback of past media technology. Today, we have Web 2.0 that evolves online social expression. It is all about social contribution, blogging, photos in flicker, and videos in YouTube. Web 2.0 went social back to youth. Now we are living in 21^st century, we have a lot of social network to communicate with each other which help us to exchanging information etc. In addition, Iphone, smart phone with features like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity have changed the way of living. With the upcoming new location-based networks old location- based networking has gone. The major social networks including Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter have launched mobile platforms and they are now easily accessible through phone in which web service is available. Now social network captured more than 100 million users, who want to share photos/videos to each other. MySpace bought PhotoBucket and Google bought YouTube and now facebook has gone to mainstream with millions of user. Social networking sites are becoming mode of attraction of brands companies as well. Brands are spending big and abandoning web pages today. Twitter which one of the social network really is a totally new concept, we have marketing channel, instant messaging, chat rooms, Data mine, and Customer service departments. I think we all can understand social is going mobile. With the time, new social networking applications are coming like Loopt, Brightkite which allows both locates your friends and now proximity dating. When I have heard about Brightkite, it doesn’t require a smart phone and allows users to tag locations and comments. In addition of those social networks, GyPsii allows you to find out your friend at any time and at any moment at any given location. It is a great website if you want to snap photos and videos with your mobile. Dating and networking is the area of interest but it is ridiculous to say that these are combining today. As we hear Hacker News that hackers are hired by many companies. Privacy becomes a bigger concern between you, your friends, facebook and the third party application. Social networking becoming pervasive as we see “login on facebook” at different sites so advertising and content curation are instantly more targetable but most don’t know what to do beyond this.

http://rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2008/09/the_past_presen.html

Mobile technology in social media in past

The Past

In Past, social media technology was location-based. To describe the mobile social media in past, I would like to talk about proximity dating. In past, we had mobile services that allowed users to do the mobile dating which further extends to proximity dating. These mobile services allow users to share information about themselves and allow communicating as location based. In order to increase the usability of these services, dating websites focus attention on users that share the same social network and proximity. Usually these services are free for users but pay fee is applied to users who are interesting in dating and messaging. They charged per message by these service providing sites. This service provider was using the Bluetooth technology to connect those people who are in the range of Bluetooth at different locations (location-based). This started known as dating.

In mobile-mad Japan, "proximity dating" has had a big success. As in Internet dating, you complete a profile of both yourself and your desired partner. Instead of suggesting people to exchange e-mails with, the service rings you on your cell phone to let you know that someone with a matching profile is within a few hundred yards of you, and allows you to arrange to meet them. Since high bandwidth mobile technology is now available in Japan, the system can also allow you to see each other on your mobile videophone before you meet.
http://rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2008/09/the_past_presen.html

[Download Chapter 2 of Living Networks]

When Web 1.0 introduced, it made it easier to had personal pages on the web. Moreover, groups had been for ages like in yahoo. We had mother club, church groups and education group in past. The major constraint was the very few people had cell that had GPS. As I already mention, mobile technology was location based which implies we were not advanced enough to communicate with each other independently.