Small World After All

Five years ago, my computer teacher took 20 minutes out of a class period to lecture her students to not "waste time" on Myspace at school. She, like many of my superiors, believed that online interaction had no value. Also, with the numerous stalker cases appearing in the news, she believed social media could even be dangerous. 

Now, in my senior year of college, I am required to interact online for each of my five classes. This semester, I have re-vamped my Facebook, updated my LinkedIn, aquired a Twitter, a blog and created a Wikipedia page. (Wikipedia is picky about its entries: I still have not been able to keep my page published for more than 24 hours!)

Outside of the classroom, I use social media as a way to keep in touch. I have moved five times in my socializing life and have attended nine campuses. This means that my friends are spread around the globe. Thankfully, I have an easy way to keep in touch online. 

As companies continue to search for ways to generate revenue online, and citizens continue to keep in touch, media enthusiasts begin to feel like a drop of water in the ocean. Too many people are distributing messages and not enough people are listening. We need to remember that in order for social media to be "social", it must be interactive. 

I believe that businesses need to approach social media with this purpose in mind: to build relationships. After all, anyone can follow 1500 people on Twitter or have a couple hundred Facebook friends. The key is making those connections work. 

Social_Media.edu

I can still remember the day my college welcome packet arrived in the mail. Not because I was anxious to discover my dorm assignment. Not because I was curious to read my class schedule. In fact, I skipped though each of those pages and focused on one line: my ".edu" E-mail address. 

The summer of 2005 was as life changing a time frame as any in my life. I had just graduated from high school and was preparing for life as a college freshman. My exposure to social media at that time was fairly limited. Although I had managed to frequently update my Xanga site with inside jokes and diary entries, I was oblivious to the impact social media would have on my life in the very near future. 

I can recall one day that summer, I was reading a friend's Xanga when I noticed an interesting link at the bottom of the page. The link read: "Check out my Facebook profile". 

What is Facebook? I wondered.  

From that moment on, the Facebook craze spread like a wild fire throughout my social circle. Talk of wall posts, profile pictures and friend requests dominated conversation. At that time, only college students could start a Facebook profile, and an E-mail address ending in ".edu" served as the secret password to this ultra-exclusive club. 

The evolution of social media has developed my generation into a very unique user. Passionate, updated and open, we are scarcely afraid of sharing too much, but always trusting of our privacy. We frequently interact with users in similar networks, and may even be open to new conversation. In many cases, we select conversation topics at the suggestion of other users. 

To this user we must tailor our message. But how do we find them?

Social Hour

I have a mission: To explore the power of social media.

Watching the news this week, I have seen more than six mentions of social media companies on various networks. From Facebook's controversial TOS changes, to Twitter lessons from a budding journalist, broadcasts have been jam-packed with social media buzzwords. 

The conversation of social media is being conducted all over the world, and although I have been actively discussing it in the classroom and at the conference table, I feel it is most appropriate to investigate the topic on its own turf: the Internet.

So, when it comes to social media, my question is the same as everyone else's: How do we use it?

Instead of focusing on the ways we manipulate the social media programs themselves and what information we should or should not publish for the world to see, I intend to start a different conversation: How can we use social media to successfully and interactively distribute our message?

The answer to this question promises to be multifaceted, multiplayer and most of all, multimedia.

Like the carb-free craze of the new millennium, social media is present everywhere. There is a plethora of opportunity to anyone willing to talk. The question now, is how do we get people to listen?

It is this very difficult question that I will attempt to answer.