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.
