expertSEM

Everyone knows the social media atmosphere is constantly evolving. Within the past year hundreds of different networks, applications, and add-ons have come onto the social scene expanding social media into the monster that it is today. The interesting thing is, social media has only begun and has many evolutionary years ahead before it is finished. The entertaining thing is, we have so called “social media experts” and “social media professionals” ready with all the answers to something that has only hit mainstream in the past few years.

I came across a post detailing social media predictions for 2009. User-generated content is becoming paramount to the web and like every evolutionary process, social media is only to going to evolve into a more user-friendly experience. People, companies, advertisers, investors, and anyone else with an opinion are going to come together to create a unified online discussion. CEO’s are going to emerge from their large desks to interact with people that like (or hate) their brand. Companies are going to turn to social media and their customers to learn more about their brand identity.

The reality is – social media is huge, so huge in fact, that people can become overwhelmed with all the noise. When pitching social media to a client, they may look at you wide-eyed and crazy, thinking to themselves – there is no way to manage it all. Finding a few social mediums that work for a company and building effective models around those mediums is going to be more productive than stringing a company across a bunch of networks that potentially will never amount to anything. Work with a client to determine what social media are the best possibly solutions for their goals. Keep in mind, however, social media is not an end solution. Social media is a means to an end.

The future of social media is heading in a direction where interaction is key. Not just interaction between people through social media but the ability to interact with different media through multiple platforms. Being able to maintain social networks from one location across mobile, internet, etc is going to be what people turn toward in the future. Finding the means is going to make a company’s social media efforts easier and the user experience better. I don’t think the platform has arrived yet that yields these results but soon we may see it popping on the radar. If you know of any platform currently available, please do share.

Regardless of where social media is or where it is heading, there is one main concept we really need to stress to our clients – to be successful in social media, you MUST be interactive. If they are not able to maintain that high level of communication, then a social campaign is more likely to fail than succeed.