The traditional media as we know it gathered its power because it held the power to transmit information quickly across the globe to a wide audience. In its early days, it used the emerging technologies of the time to facilitate this. The high cost of these technologies meant that the power was concentrated with the rich media companies. In the present day, as the Internet became ubiquitous and the power of sharing that it brought became more obvious, the traditional media started to lose its power to blogs and expressions of citizen journalism.
Into this scenario came the now wildly popular Facebook which threatens to topple media empires and establish a new way of sharing and getting information. This is only to be expected. If we look at the source of the power the media holds, it is from its role of letting people know what is happening in their surroundings and shaping their opinions. Facebook does the same, only in a more personalized way. The traditional media still has the edge when it comes to delivering news about the happenings around the world, but Facebook comes up trumps when it comes to delivering news of the personal world. Its success is dependent on twin factors:
1) The willingness of its users to share happenings in their worlds.
2) The willingness of user's friends to notice and react to it.
These two factors arise out of the importance people give to their personal worlds compared to the world at large. This love of the personal over the impersonal is also what makes Facebook so much more powerful than the traditional media at shaping public perception.
What this means for corporations is that there is no longer a single world where corporations can use mass means of communication to get their message across, but multiple personal worlds linked to each other through personal connections. The information that is generated and shared between these worlds comes not as much from external sources, as it comes from other worlds connected to them. The traditional media no longer tells people what they ought to do, it is the personal networks developed by the people which do that. So, corporations of the future can get to their consumers not by beaming advertisements, but by 'becoming friends' with its consumers and leveraging their networks to make more friends. The more friends a company has in this web of worlds, the more its potential customers. The question therefore before companies is something that had been around for ages, 'How do I make friends?'
Hope this thought of "trying to make friends" is already implemented in some areas ... But if this comes into social networking communites then there is no place left for people to discuss personal things ... May be in future there will be secured social networking and free social networking sites ...
ReplyDeleteIf this gets implements there is no way people encourge such advertisements... just to ignore once habituated to advertisements.... Business people shud be creative enough to implement new ways of reaching people instead of going into social sites ....
Sarvesh Kumar
If you, me and 10 of our other friends talk about Nikon cameras, we are indirectly advertising for Nikon cameras. So, how will all our friends know about Nikon cameras here? Not through Nikon's ads, but through us. That is what I meant by a company forming friends with people; becoming a hot topic in our conversation and thus becoming known to more people.
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