Social Media Strategies and Technologies

Nice video on “Madison Avenue Blues” after new media revolution, I hope you will enjoy it.

What is your take?.

The new media is growing at rapid pace, there are already hundreds of millions of users on online social sites and millions of new users joining social sites every month, also penetration of internet and mobile in developing world provides better reach of technology and drives the social web technology usage by  proving visible benefits  to individuals, brands and socities, standards like OpenId/OpenWeb encourages people to try new online services using existing credentials instead of getting over loaded by managing authorization information for each online service. These changes will drive the adoption of social web by individuals, businesses, brands, marketers, researchers and physical social communities around the world along with new technology innovations for mining online content across social web to create structured information for particular search terms, online engagement and reputation measurement tools, real-time information retrieval & search, social advertising and marketing measurement tools with brands heavily using sociable ads to market research and engage with consumers in advertisements [In social ads people can customize advertisements with their profile data  like picture,name,location, why they like it etc and share it among their network of friends to drive ripple effect for brand ads].

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We will also see many software as service (SaaS) providers like Salesforce.com integrating social engagement tools into their product offerings  and growth of community based customer support sites for many  products and services.

The growth of social media also needs standards  and adoption of OpenWeb (having one authorization and access control to use complete social web services) by online service providers, social user data usage, security & privacy policies,  social media measurement metrics and engagement(ad,campaigns or community) guidelines for better utilization of new media potential and leveraging it’s benefits.

According to recent article in TechCrunch, “every minute more than 20 hours of video is being uploaded to Youtube” and Nielsen-Online reports that people spend lot of time on video sharing & social sites on Internet than anywhere else, what it means is that very soon production houses will use video sharing sites as channel for their content sales like the early experiments of ESPN with Youtube. Also there are tens of millions of blogger’s around the world producing online content almost regularly if not everyday,while their content may be not as good as a professional journalists but good enough to draw the attention of online users to encourage  people journalism trends.My perception is that business conditions and people behaviors are changing as technology evolves with new age digital platforms and tools, so it’s the time for brands to embrace new media adoption rather resisting it to become extinct from business.

[This post is an excerpt of my  Social Media Trends And Growth of Digital Media article on Silicon India magazine]

BestBuy has been using social media channels to connect, create awareness and collaborate with their customers or prospects, below is the video from Best Buy CMO on “How BestBuy Marketing Is Moving To Digital” from traditional channels and how they are using and planning to use digital media technologies for customer engagement.

This is another good sign of how big brands are realizing the potential of online media platforms, social conversations on digital platforms and most importantly the customer engagement factor (as said in Video, companies are talking with customers not talking at customers) is being recognized as a part of any brand business.

What is your take on the future of marketing?