Social Media Communication
Since the advent of the internet, the ways in which people choose to communicate have changed dramatically. With the evolution of social media, these changes have accelerated even faster.
Changes in online communication affect the fundamental ways that people interact with each other. Social aspects now dominate a large proportion of internet content which is tagged, classified, reviewed and commented on by people all over the world. Increasingly people are seeking out this type of content on the internet.
Social media has revolutionised consumer interactions with companies and brands. One of the first changes brought about by social media was its impact on consumer voice. Social media empowered consumers and provided them with a voice that would be listened to by other consumers. Dialogue also opened up between consumers and businesses and as a result, consumers now expect a more personal relationship with businesses in the social media arena.
In a recent McKinsey Report, 87 percent of executives report using Web 2.0 applications to communicate with customers. Of these, over half use Web 2.0 technologies to encourage customer participation in product development, a similar proportion use Web 2.0 to enable customers to communicate with each other. Consumers are becoming increasingly familiar with the process of interacting with strangers who share a common interest. For a business to be successful within this environment they must interact honestly and show accountability.
According to social media marketing statistics for 2009, analysed by Nielson Online, social networks and blogs are two of the most popular online activities, even more popular than personal email. Through social media, people are systematically expressing openly what was previously deemed to be private information. For instance, it’s very common for social networking users to advertise personal information such as political views, religious views or sexual orientation.
An individual’s personal and professional networks share the same online realm and are laid out for other network members to see. This often highlights the disparity between how people represent themselves to and communicate with the different social groups in their life. Indeed, there are now measures in place on social networking sites to segregate these groups, for example, separate out colleagues, family and friends, and only show each group information that is appropriate to them.
One-to-one private email conversations are now publicly communicated through social networks and it’s even possible to be updated on a friend’s activities without ever having to communicate with them directly. Users of sites such as Facebook or Twitter are becoming used to receiving very detailed notifications of their friends’ lives, including those with whom they may have no offline contact. Conversations with strangers are also becoming common through applications such as flyChat, an iPhone based network that allows the user to randomly send and receive messages from people all over the world in order to build networks.
Another newcomer to the social media scene is Google Wave, due to be released later on this year – its purpose is to ‘unify’ communication on the web. It combines email, web chat and instant messaging to enable people to have ongoing conversations with others. Conversations can at the same time be synchronous and asynchronous due to the ability to see conversations in real time, but also to be able to leave a thread and return to it later. It features the ability to replay conversations and to easily distribute files.
With new technologies entering the market all the time, the ways in which people communicate with each other both personally and professionally look set to continue evolving.