All Hail Social Media

Social Media has become an extremely important aspect to almost every business across the country. With over 90% of marketers admitting that social media is a big part of their business strategy it would be ridiculous for a company to not jump on the bandwagon. But don't be fooled, this whole social media boom wasn't kicked off by MySpace in 2003, in fact LinkedIn was actually created before MySpace it just didn't blow up until a few years ago. One of the very first forms of social media was a "system" created in the late 70's, which allowed users to post articles for others to see, similar to an online newspaper. Eventually companies like Geis (now known as GXS) and CompuServe started to make a push towards a chat/email program that could be used, but seeing as innovative technology is always expensive, not many people could afford the hefty charges. AOL was the first affordable chat/mail company, leaving us with a famous line that we will never forget, "You've got mail!" Companies then started to work towards live blogs, journals, and forums, allowing people to rapidly interact about thousands of different topics. We can even count video games such as the World of Warcraft as a kind of social media, but not the kind that is used today as a part of most business' marketing strategies. Although many companies came up with ideas that were similar to the World of Warcraft, letting people rapidly engage in conversation, network, trade and exchange products while maintaining steady business relationships, in fact it is quite fascinating how similar the business world is to one of the first socially interactive games ever created.

Today we are surrounded by thousands of social media companies, the three behemoths being Facebook, with over 800 million users, Twitter with over 150 million and LinkedIn racking up 161 million, making it the biggest professional network on the internet. It is impossible to go through your day without seeing anything related to social media whether it be on a company billboard with the little "f" or "t" symbol for Facebook and Twitter, or on the TV screen that your looking at while eating your breakfast. Social media sucks you in like quicksand yet spreads like wildfire, a very deadly combination... but technology moves in mysterious ways, people thought MySpace wouldn't disappear as quickly as it did and that Facebook would be a successful public company, which has actually turned out to be the worst IPO in history... so seeing as no one can truly predict the future, my question to you is, what's next?