New Mindset for Marketers

This video shows social media's huge impact on businesses today. So how should marketers utilize these tools to the fullest? When I was on twitter the other day, somebody's tweet said something like this "many tv news started tweeting nowadays but they just copy and pasted what's on their web. Rather than that, let's have communication. Isn't it a place to discuss criticism, reflection and foresight of the news honestly?"

Many people who's already familiar with social networking will think, "duh" to this tweet. But sadly it's a fact that many companies who do use social media for their marketing don't realize this. They take social media just like other advertising medium and nothing more. While it's biggest potential is in communication.

"One of the fun challenges of working in the social media analytics field is helping companies figure out how to learn and apply knowledge from what consumers say online about their brand, products and competitors to strengthen customer relationships and ultimately grow their businesses."
said Mike Spataro, in his article.

Although it is difficult to determine ROI in social media and might not seem like working at first, the return's dimension is a whole lot wider than original advertising medium. It makes marketer to communicate with customers and find the way to improve their business in addition to earning more customers.

As companies go into a new way of marketing using social media, the marketer also needs to have a new mind set of "learning" from the stream.

+photo credit+ http://www.nodiamonds.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/istock_000004936705xsmall.jpg

Being Part of the Live Stream

Web 1.0 was all about receiving information online, then Web 2.0 allowed user to participate in generating the content. It made social networking a very common thing to all of us, so what's next?

As I surfed through the internet looking for articles to read, I found a key word that kept appearing in web pages: Live Stream. More information technology development and increased number of users made it possible to create "streams" online, and future's social networking is all about being part of it.

Tac Anderson explained how future of journalism and advertisement will be in his article on SocialMediaToday. He explained that more people will act like journalists, participating in reporting what's happening real time, making a stream. Not only bloggers and journalists but ordinary people could become a part of it. What's more interesting, is that through this process, advertisement become the part of stream, not something that pops up on your window and irritates you.

I also watched a video of Michael Stelzner interviewing Steve Rubel, who quit blogging five years ago. He puts more importance in "being everywhere" meaning making his appearance on every social networks to speedily convey messages to customers, rather than blogging. I also see the similarity here about being in the "stream". Businesses needs to know what people are interested in at this moment in real time. Twitter is sort of proving this future prediction is right. And whatever the business that could be part of the stream will success in catching customer's attention.

+Photo Credit+
Mashable, The Social Media Guide

Journalism=Business?

When I read an article AOL Moves to Build Tech 'Newsroom of the Future' from Business Week, I had some mixed feelings.

Journalism is changing. Many people stopped reading news papers, and most people get daily news from the Internet. AOL came up with this idea of tracking what people are talking about online, and use that information to write news articles that people are interested in, or what is popular at this moment. In result, more people will read the news and more advertisement income for AOL.

I felt a little bit scary, be honest with you, that this technology one day might make journalism a mare business. If journalists only write about what people would like to read, it loses its meaning. I work for a national TV and I cover mostly about politics. I know people don't necessarily love to hear about political news all the time, but I feel like that's our call to keep reporting about it. But if more people rely on Internet news source and AOL way becomes the majority, the news that is important but not necessarily popular will start disappearing.

Although it is important, that journalists get to hear readers' opinion too. It just shouldn't control what journalists write about. I hope the technology AOL came up with, will help journalists and readers communicate, instead of making journalism no more than money making business.