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’s been recently reported by Mashable, that the Swine Flu Outbreak is recording 10,000 tweets per hour on Twitter. This number boggles my mind. It’s amazing the viral reach that Twitter can measure (no pun intended!). However I can’t help but wonder if the power of social media could potentially inspire mass panic during a situation that is merely watch and wait? How do we filter the information coming from thousands of Twitterers to determine what is truly legitimate information? And if you are one of the truly legitimate organizations, how do you separate yourself from a pack of impassioned Twits who merely want more followers and do not have any valuable information to share?
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.
