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?'
