Story #1: According to a media report, candidates for Obama's new cabinet, as a candidate screening process, their 'social media network', like myspace will be reviewed.
Story #2: Recently, I had a conversation with one of my friends in the US. At that time, he had a couple of job interviews, and told me that now companies review job candidates' social networks to find who they are, and who they are connected...
Here, Evans talk about the importance of social media, besides search engine. Social media is "social" because it really engages people. The above example is about finding out a certain people to engage with whom in what manners. Traditionally, companies use 'megaphone' to talk to consumers, but, with the social media, like blogs, now companies (can/should) share conversation with consumers.
Why the new marketing/Ad/PR/even journalism is 'conversation'? First, direction: in the past, companies 'shoot' messages towards consumer, but, consumers had few tools to talk to companies. Why? Publishing cost was high, so, only companies normally could spend advertising money, building fancy websites, etc. But, due to 'cheap technology'(for example, it costs nothing to produce your blog), now, people also have public channel to talk to many people. So, now, it is really two way street. Second, timing: if we consider real conversation offline, it happens on a real time basis, not one person says one thing, and much later someone responds. With the social media, now people can share opinions on a real time basis.
So, with the two direction and real time, social media becomes a real conversation tool between institutions and lay people, and this is the first time ever in our history.
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2 comments:
I have to say that i don't agree with you about the real time conversations in bloggs. Sure, it might be faster than previously, but it's still far from a real time dialog.
A proble mi have with the ways blogs are constructed is that the two parts, company and consumer in this case, don't speak on equal grounds. The company posts it's messages in the blog, while the consumers can only use the comments.
I also feel that in this format, with blog comments, it's the one who skreams the loudest that will be heared. In other words, it's not nessesarily the views of the average customer that is beeing reflected in the comments.
It's quite scary if social networks are starting to be used to evaluate people. I imagine it would be ok to look at one's professional contacts, but if the procedure is about checking out what people you hang out with and so on, it turns into something else.
Also, perhaps most importantly, you can't judge people from the profile picture on their Facebook account. Personally, I see a kind of danger in judgment on this narrow basis and really hope that this does not become a regular practice. However, if it does I imagine Facebook and the likes will be forced to protect its users' privacy more efficiently, so in the end I guess we won't really get to that situation anyway...
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