Social Media Landscape in 2011

Social Media Definition

How do you define social media? The KISS (Keep It Short Sim­ple) from Brian Solis:

Any tool or ser­vice that uses the inter­net to facil­i­tate conversations.

or the long ver­sion (some peo­ple are never satisfied):

Social Media is the democ­ra­ti­za­tion of infor­ma­tion, trans­form­ing peo­ple from con­tent read­ers into pub­lish­ers. It is the shift from a broad­cast mech­a­nism, one-to-many, to a many-to-many model, rooted in con­ver­sa­tions between authors, peo­ple, and peers.

Why Social Media mat­ters to you

It’s sim­ple. With Social Media, it’s eas­ier to be knows as an expert in your field. Con­sider this: About 5 years ago, if you want to make an impact, you need to cre­ate a web­site and pro­mote it through search engine opti­miza­tion (SEO) or using pay-per-click (PPC).

Now, it’s so much eas­ier to put out your mes­sage or brand yourself.

Last night, I hap­pen to watch the state TV. In one of their adver­tise­ments, it told us to tune in at a cer­tain time and date to catch a new movie trailer. And the trailer is avail­able in YouTube.

That’s social media at work.

The Brand “You, Inc.”

You can now eas­ily mar­ket your­self, your prod­ucts or ser­vices. If your have a pre­sen­ta­tion, you can upload it to SlideShare.com; a report that you wrote be made avail­able to any­one on Scribd.com or Box.net.

Have a prod­uct to show? You can make a video and upload it on YouTube.com or Vimeo.com.

Want a plat­form to engage your cus­tomers, Facebook.com and Twitter.com are the answer.

And all this info that you share be tied down to a blog, which now effec­tively becomes a resource cen­ter of You, Inc.

The cost to you? Just the time needed to engage your market.

The tra­di­tional media like TV or radio are increas­ingly becomes irrel­e­vant. I hardly watch TV now and have not lis­ten to the radio for months. I get far more var­ied news online, from an inter­na­tional serv­ing, not bound by the whim of one edi­tor or a state. My MP3 player have replaced the radio.

Social Media Land­scape 2011

This is how the social media land­scape looks now. Face­book and Google are the main­stays of social media for now.

Uti­lize the social media fully and use it to con­nect with your clients, cus­tomers and to develop new markets.

Don’t even think of doing it the old-fashioned way. If you’re think­ing of a Get-Rich-Fast scheme, think again. Social media mar­ket­ing is about being a resource, of giv­ing more info and being use­ful to others.

Right now to suc­ceed you must give more and then some more.

Social Media Land­scape 2011

Related arti­cles

• In Social Media, Fail­ing to Plan is Plan­ning to Fail (briansolis.com)
• “Your Social Media Roadmap” Solves the Prob­lem of How to Cre­ate an Inte­grated Social Media Mar­ket­ing Strat­egy (prweb.com)
• What Hap­pens On Social Media In 2011? (mindjumpers.com)
• Why more busi­nesses will be har­ness­ing social media in 2011 — guest blog by Char­lotte Brit­ton (questprblog.com)