The Future of Social Media

I decided to look into more detail about the future of social media because in recent years it has been changing at an alarming rate. Grant Pardee reflects on this in his article 'The Future of Social Media According to VICE'. Social Media is now a dated tool in society. The communications it refers to has become cemented into our everyday existence. Users of social networking sites jumped from 9% to 49% between early 2005 and late 2006. According to Facebook, there are more than 1.35 billion active users. Now, social media feels as if its the backbone of society not just the internet.

The fastest growth is occurring on Tumblr, Snapchat and Instagram. Unfortunately, I am not that familiar with Tumblr but considering its active user base grew by over 120% this year, maybe I'd want to be. Instagram seems to mainly be popular with teenagers and Snapchat has gotten so popular, it rejected a $3 billion offer from Facebook.

Its hard to predict what will happen to social media sites in the future as we can't predict their next moves, but I firmly believe Snapchat is becoming increasingly popular especially with its new updates. I feel there might also be another form of Whatsapp, which could be detrimental for Facebook's recent investment.

TED Talk - Jimmy Wales - The birth of WIkipedia

In week 11 I watched the Ted Talk by Jimmy Wales on 'the birth of Wikipedia'. He defines Wikipedia as a freely licensed encyclopedia written by thousands of volunteers all over the world in numerous languages. I was fascinated by this topic having previously learnt about user generated content in previous lectures. Anyone is entitles to edit and save content on Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales was the founder of Wikimedia Foundation who own Wikipedia, so listening to his talk on it was very credible and interesting.

Wikipedia, interestingly enough, doesn't cost a lot to run. They are funded by donations from the public and are more popular than the New York Times! Wikipedia do around 1.4 billion page views monthly with the total monthly cost of their bandwidth - $5,000!

When discussing quality control, yes there are people who vandalize Wikipedia pages in the sense of writing absolute rubbish but Wales states that this content is fixed very quickly due to the huge amount of users who have these pages on watch lists. There is also a 'delete' and 'keep' aspect to Wikipedia. However if 15 people say delete and 3 people say keep, sometimes the content will be kept if there is supporting evidence to back it up.

So it is important to understand the Wiki model is the way the company work it. Considering social methodology is the passion of the community Wikipedia are very flexible in the process they use to generate their content.

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Socialnomics

This reading provided me with an insight to understanding the implications of social media on our daily lives. It also provides an insight in how businesses these days are becoming more aware of social media and using this as a platform to increase sales, cut marketing costs and engage with their consumers directly.

"Socialnomics explores the impact social media is having on the way companies are developing and marketing products that reaches consumers directly and eliminates middleman waste". (Qualman 2012)

Erik Qualman conducted meetings with 75 Fortune companies, 50 colleges and universities and over 100 small businesses and non - profit organisations to understand further the power behind social media in business. I learnt the key to social media success is doing rather than deliberating.

Qualman states that due to online word of mouth, traditional marketing methods are becoming obsolete. This can aid companies who have a poor offline word of mouth and can strengthen companies even more who already have a strong online presence.

The advantage of social media is that word of mouth can lead to world of mouth in the sense that your message can go global. Barrack Obama even used social media tools to promote his presidency campaign.

In the last chapter, it focuses on putting PPC agencies out of business through a socialnomic model where search engines get paid for sales, not clicks, by advertisers.

Flickr

Flickr is a great way in helping people make their photos available to the people that matter to them. This social media tool allows users to capture their photos and videos and share them with viewers. Flickr allows you to to share these moments privately or publicly.

I learnt how to display my photos, taking them from the web and from my phone. It's fascinating at the amount of photos and videos you can upload, both on your profile and at a time.

Organizing your photos and videos can be collaborative. Permission can be granted to your friends and family to organize your stuff and not just to add comments on your media but they can add notes and tags.

Below shows my media on my Flickr.