The latest buzz in social media is Four Square, a social networking site that is accessed as an application through your smartphone. It then works off of GPS, allowing the application to report where you are at any given time. The benefit? If you’re dining at a restaurant and have just sat down to order, a friend can post a recommendation of what to eat, mobile-to-mobile.
Forsman & Bodenfors came up with another innovative digital campaign for Ikea by turning one of Facebook’s basic functions into a promotional tool, to promote the opening of the brand’s Malmo outpost, its most modern store to date.
Social Media is a wonderful tool for friends to reconnect, colleagues and associates to network and businesses to promote their services and products. However with the recent Facebook controversy related to the Holocaust denial group being allowed to remain on Facebook, inevitable questions are raised as to where the line should be drawn when it comes to freedom of speech versus terms of use violations.
It seems every day, I hear of another success story related to social networking and how it has a direct correlation to increased revenue. And the return on investment is usually high, considering that social media has little to no hard cost associated with it, only time. Even for those companies who opt to have a third party manage their social media on their behalf, the ROI is still high as compared to traditional advertising. That leads me to the point of this post. What’s your social media success story?
People are changing the way they communicate, moving away from email and towards the real-time, publishing format of social networks such as Facebook. With 175 million users, it’s easy to see where the buzz is coming from. And as I watch the tweets coming from my friends on Twitter, I’m amazed. Had I gone to Austin this week, I could have simply looked at my Twitter app on my iphone and found endless updates from fellow Tweeters about where they were eating, meeting and socializing. It is truly a revolutionary way to communicate in real-time with an unlimited audience.
