What is Social Media?
To talk about Social media, we need to define what social media is:
Taken from Wikipedia:
Social media describes the online tools and platforms that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other. Social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video. Popular social mediums include blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, and vlogs.
Chris Shipley (Co-founder and Global Research Director for Guidewire Group) is considered the first person to have coined the term “social media.”
Some examples of social media are:
- Affirmative Solutions
- MySpace
- YouTube
- Second Life
- Digg
- del.icio.us
- Flickr
- Memeorandum
- Livejournal
Companies that use social media to reach out to their customers include AOL, DaimlerChrysler, ESPN, McDonald’s™ , SIRIUS Satellite Radio, Sprint, Sun Microsystems, Unilever and Yahoo!
Companies use corporate blogs, wikis, and other types of social media to reach out to their customers. Are companies profiting from their blogs? According to some bloggers such as http://www.scripting.com/2006/08/22.html#lastYearsRevenue23Million , they are.
But companies also receive intangible benefits from blogging. Marketing, exposure, and accessibility to their customer base. But that accessibility is what scares some companies. Some companies are scared to publish a blog for fear that employees or customers will post negative information about the company.
But this is what the companies should be viewing as a positive, the fact that the blog can give a company a chance to hear what is working or not working and give the company a chance to react or make it right. Many times the information flowing up the corporate ladder gets fuzzy but when it is in black and white on a blog, it is there for the CEO on down to read and react to it. And the reaction is what seperates good companies from great companies that provide excellent customer service.