Making Cents of It All- Part I: Executive Summary
Someone, on a forum I visit, recently asked the question, “Can Advertising Work On Social Networks?” The idea and practice of social media is not new and only recently have we been able to put a face to a name. As people we seem to have a constant need to categorize things and organize to the nth degree. Remember “grunge” music that has slowly evolved and been renamed a second time as “alt” rock? I always saw it as just “rock and roll.” I am probably preaching to the choir, but if I don’t get my thoughts down on the ones and zeros it will fester to the point where I can’t move forward. However, if you haven’t heard this before hopefully there is something new you can take from it and if not some things bare repeating, because as humans we have a difficult time practicing what we preach. In other words, common sense sometimes needs to be repeated to those who don’t get it the first time, or second, or third.
The more I learn about business and communications the more I become interested in psychology and observing the way people think. I always said while going back to business school that you needed to get your doctorate in psychology to be good at marketing. Now that obviously isn’t the case, but it probably gives those who do that edge. Considering my communications background and family history I have always tried to take the holistic approach, social media is no different and in fact is the culmination of business, marketing and communications, pyschology and human behavior, sociopolitical, and cultural viewpoints.
As someone who is self employed I have been seeing an uptick in sales leads with recently laid off professionals who are looking to create their own web presence through various lynch pinning and tie-ins to social media sites as well as creating their own personal brands to start their own businesses. This is good, but also very hard to pull off versus say a company brand. You can’t just be on the Internet for social media to work. It is about the offline activities like networking events, and even more important for the personal brand, public speaking. It is about bringing people and ideas together that otherwise wouldn’t normally cross paths.
Job portals will be a thing of the past when social networking, like the cell phone before it, tools like Twitter, speeds up the conversation and understanding of character references with regards to hiring in new positions and doing business. The underlying message in any of it, like brand marketing, is that grass roots level or word of mouth marketing has more bang for the buck for effectively reaching the desired goal/audience.
Some say we are in Web 2.0, but I would disagree. Social media has been around longer before it was finally been accepted by mainstream audiences and in fact has been around since Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), Multi Player Online Role Playing Games (MPORG), Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Instant Messaging (IM), and Intenet forums and online communities due in part to the implementation of new programming languages like Java, Perl, Python, PHP, Flash, Ruby on Rails, AJAX etc. Geeks and Nerds are the new black. I believe we are actually in a renewal stage of the internet and are closer to Web 3.0 with the sites like Youtube and Facebook becoming more popular coupled with integrated applications like Twitter.
Platforms like the Google’s Android G1 and Apple’s next generation iPhone will allow for video capture, editing, sharing, and remixing of rich media. 
The speed at which this has occurred in the last two years has only been fueled by the bad economy and new techonlogy innovation in the tech sector – i.e. Google opening up its Application Programming Interface (API) to developers (opensourcing/crowdsourcing) in order to continue world dominance (see Google Wave), and more and more people going online to look for jobs. The reason Google is so successful and continues to stay competitive is their understanding of being inclusive and sharing of ideas where most of their competitors are in a closed mindset thus being one step behind. This is not to say that Google doesn’t have propietary products with lots of patents, but it is the organizational culture they have grown not only internally, but externally as well, much like Apple has done creating its cult like following. A Twitter user that I follow, DesignRiffs, said it best, “Social media is not a store front, but a way to hand out free samples.” (#)
