Loyalty Plus's Blog: The future of Social Media

One of my friends recently posted the following comment on Facebook: “I wonder how we will remember Facebook in 2030. Will we see it as a craze gone wrong in the same fashion as we think back at disco music, perms, Modern Talking and roller skates? Or will it be mentioned in the same breath as landing a man on the moon, the '95 Rugby World Cup final and Pringles Chips? I suspect the former.” And I intend to disagree, hear me out:

Bob Dylan once said, ‘the times they are a changin’. Allow me to shed some light on the road of social media development:

In 2008, a very interesting article was published in the Public Relations Journal (Public Relations Society of America), on the three-year-long international survey of public relations practioners examining the impact of blogs and other social media were having on public relations practice. The results indicated that both blogs and social media have enhanced what happened in the public relations sector and that social media and traditional mainstream media complemented each other. Further to this, the emergence of blogs and social media has changed the way their companies communicated, especially with regards to the external audiences. These findings suggested that social media complemented traditional news media, and that blogs and social media influenced coverage in the traditional news media sector. Therefore, blogs and social media have made communications more instantaneous by encouraging companies to respond more quickly to criticism.

In 2009, an article was printed in the ScienceDirect Journal (Indiana University) stating that social media was the new hybrid element of the promotional mix as it made it possible for one person to communicate with hundreds or thousands of other people about products and the companies that provide them. It argues that social media should be considered as part of the promotion mix because in the traditional sense it enables companies to talk to their customers, while in a non-traditional sense it enables customers to talk directly to one another.

In 2011, another article was published in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology stated the role Social media was playing in the business industry and how it could enhance existing resources and capabilities in a company. All of this could be done by adopting appropriate social media guidelines, training and policy enforcement across all sectors and departments. Adopting social media by itself will not confer a company’s sustained competitive advantage but capabilities thus enhanced could confer a company’s sustained competitive advantage.

Social media seems to be doing it more frequently than other marketing channels. Let me venture even deeper into this rabbit hole. If you go onto any search engine today, you will find millions of social media jobs being incorporated into marketing jobs along with ROI (return-on-investment) tools to measure your social media content and strategies. Every marketer out there is also fully aware that we need to keep track of the entire do’s and don’ts and changes as social media generates leads – a marketer’s gold mine! We as marketers also realise that social media strategies must form part of the broad and general marketing mix therefore we know that social media is here to stay – period.

Just have a look at the following stats which proves the value of social media:

*Source: Webmarketing123. 'The State of Digital Marketing 2012 Report,' Aug 28, 2012.