“It’s that final one, though, that really shows why social media isn’t just a new channel, but really a chance to rethink and redefine our jobs. In the past, “media” was a thing we bought or placed or planned. I think that’s still true, but it is a limiting definition. Today we should take a chance to broaden that. I’d like to offer a new definition of “media”: any moment when the brand and the consumer come into contact with each other.” –Gary Stein, “Nobody Get Social Media…Yet”
Q:In what ways is social media something new and different? In what ways is social media something that has always been around? To what extent does social media require new skills and capabilities for organizations?
A: Social media is something new and different in a ton of different ways. First of all it allows us as consumers to be able to access load of information about different organizations and products that we might not have known about otherwise. As social beings, humans need to interact with others as well and this is a huge part of social media as a whole. With the development of MySpace, twitter, Facebook, and all of the other unknown sites out there, we meet people that we might not have ever met before and we also can reconnect with people that we might not have ever heard from again.
In retrospect, social media has been around for decades. The innovation of social clubs has definitely impacted social media in a few ways. Clubs are a way to bring people together that have the same interest in a specific thing. If you really examine a social media website, that is the main purpose of it. We need to interact with other human beings because that’s the only way we won’t go completely insane.
In organizations, these days, it is important to have a social media site. We need to be able to save money in some way and promote as a corporate structure. The company I work for is a retail business and without their Facebook, a lot of people wouldn’t know about certain events and things going on in our company. Social media is a huge deal for everyone these days and I don’t see the trend dying down anytime soon.
Daniel M Schwartz