With all this buzz about Twitter and Facebook more and more savvy entrepreneurs and business affiliates are seeing the wide range of opportunities that social media presents for marketing and advertising. 

Just so that we’re all on the same page, social media is media designed to disperse as a result of social interactions. Social media supports the marriage between technology and the human need to interact on a social level, some popular examples include: Technorati, Flickr, LinkedIn, Youtube, Wikipedia and more.  Social media supports: making a democracy of information and knowledge, of transforming one-to-many media dialogues into many-to-many social media dialogues, and converting people from content consumers to producers. So what does all of this have to do with marketing?

At the heart of marketing and advertising is to engage people such that they go from being interested in what is being offered to being a loyal consumer.  The problems with traditional advertising, ie: print posters, radio and television commercials, etc is that they rarely engage viewers and have become less personal, therefore leaving a detachment between a potential customer and the advertised company. Many viewers are left with the notion of ‘what will it do for me?’ This is where social media breaks barriers. Once you have joined and actively participated in online communities with valuable information, mere network connections start to build trust and recognize your output as valuable. This is exactly what brands and companies want to establish with their current and potential customers: trust. With the help of the Internet and social media these same companies can connect with people from all types of demographics, a task not easily carried out with traditional advertising and marketing campaigns. The reality of these online social communities is that they contain millions of people worldwide who have the potential, from a business perspective, to be converted into your next customers.

Yes, social media is the current trend and none of us can accurately predict how long it will last or where it will go. But one of the key factors to good marketing is staying with the trends, also known as ‘keeping up with the Jones’’; it’s where the leaders are and where most people want to be. Look at how marketing on the Internet has flourished. In the early 90s when the Internet first started, the average person didn’t really understand what it was or what purpose it could serve to them. The smart business and marketing people saw an opportunity, jumped on the bandwagon and are now veterans of advertising on the most used information platform in the world. For all we know, social media could be the tiny wave that is supposed to forewarn us of the Tsunami waiting to happen, so don’t let the wave pass you by.