The Current Social Media Phenomena
Social media is online content created by people using highly accessible publishing technologies.
In its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news,
information and content. It is a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologues (one
to many) into dialogues (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming
people from content readers into authors. Social media has become extremely popular because it
allows people to connect in the online world to form relationships for personal, political and
business use. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content or consumer-generated
media.
Social media can take many different forms, including Internet forums, blogs, wikis, podcasts,
pictures and video. It has become apparent to that the Internet is an inherently social medium. That
will not change, as people will always want to engage with one another online, and social media
will be there in one form or another to accommodate this need.
Pew Internet found in its 2011 Social Networking survey that 65% of US online adults are using a
social networking tool like Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter. The average American worker is
currently spending 1.2 hours daily on social-media related tasks. At present, 61% of online
Americans under 30 use social media-related Websites on a daily basis. As this chorus of
conversations and the proliferation of technologies that enable participation in social media grow,
companies must make sense of the new channel for consumer interaction.
The growth of social media is already having a tremendous impact on business throughout the
world. Social media is changing the rules of the marketplace, just like the Internet did a decade
ago. It is still early and no one -- not even the experts – knows what the total impact it will have on
the marketplace. But it is clear that times are changing again, and those that do not embrace social
media will go the way of print media.
