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Making sense of social media

February 12, 2008 | Internet Marketing

With more than 70 percent of Americans (ages 15 to 34) actively using social networking, and 90 percent of marketers now characterizing online customer engagement as "essential" or "important," there's little confusion over why brands are increasingly thinking and behaving like community and content companies.

The socialization of the web was the most important and transformational trend of 2006. It was even more present in 2007, and it’s showing no signs of stopping this year. With more than 70 percent of Americans (ages 15 to 34) actively using social networking, and 90 percent of marketers now characterizing online customer engagement as “essential” or “important,” there’s little confusion over why brands are increasingly thinking and behaving like community and content companies.

But with the pace of Web 2.0 innovation, marketers are confronted with a tsunami of features, concepts and oddly spelled lingo. With all the noise and jargon being tossed around, it’s often difficult to discern prescience from platitudes.

As a practitioner of “online community” for more than 10 years, even I occasionally mismatch my moblog with my meebo or mistakenly twitter my trackbacks. So what exactly is social media? What’s a simple definition that I can use to organize my thoughts and make some basic decisions about where and how I should be investing in this new dimension of online marketing?

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