Experiences

The age of social media

social-media-age
social-media-age

Ever since man started walking the earth, there has always been something phenomenal that he does which will greatly influence the future, and it will be a land mark that would always be associated with that particular time period.

After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the existing European trade links by land with Asia was severed, and this led to many explorers beginning to seek routes east by sea. The mid 15th century was the age of discovery – an age that saw great explorers travel to new lands and discover whole civilizations that the new world didn’t know existed. When these explorers went home, they took detailed accounts from these distant lands and generated much hype to cause their government to sponsor expeditions for national interests. All this happened during the age of the print media, where you have books telling of adventurous tales, and maps were made to fan the fire of curiosity, which was spread everywhere with the help of the printing press. This led to the rise of humanism and nationalism, ushering in a new age of colonial empires, where nations wanted to show they were more powerful than the rest, through overseas expansion.

Fast forward to the 21st century, and to the year `2012, from where has risen a new age – the age of the social media. The age of the social media, just like the other ages before it, is like a twig that branches out from a tree trunk, the trunk in this case being the internet. The social media has branched off from the age of the internet, and has followed the characteristics of other ages. Recently, at a social media day launch at the University of Nairobi, the CEO of Marketing Society of Kenya, gave world statistics of the most visited websites, and it came as no surprise that of the top 10 sites, 8 were of the social media. google.com and wikipedia.org are the non-social media sites of this top 10 list. And, this is evidence enough to tells us that of the world’s over 3 billion internet users, most of them will undoubtedly spend a large chunk of their time on social media.

Social media utility is like a virus, which always keeps on changing and adapting to the new environment. While social media was initially used for pure entertainment, it has been taken up by large corporates, over the last few years, to market their brands to a large potential market. This worked for a while, where all you could do was, maybe, like a page for a particular brand, and from then on all one could see was them pushing products to you on your time-line. Then, when every Tom, Dick, and Harry started doing this, consumers started avoiding these pages. The brands evaluated the situation, and came up with better ways of “pushing” products. They decided to use social media as an interaction platform. Consumers loved this, because now they could engage with their brands and get almost instant feedback to their particular queries.

However, the social media was still a double-edged-sword, because now that the consumers had the power of engaging the brands at such a personal level, the brands had to be very cautious of bad publicity that might follow if a particular complaint was handled wrongly. This is because something can go viral worldwide, in a matter of seconds and cause unrepairable damage to the company’s image.

Social media is here to stay, at least till such time we stumble upon something better than it, and until such a time all I can tell you is embrace it, learn from it, and live with it.



Add your thoughts about this story

comments


About Joe Maina

Joe Maina studied Advertising and logistics and is currently pursuing a professional course in Securities and investments. He is a technology buff who loves discovering new tech solutions that make work simpler. He has additional skills in video production and print media. He is an avid learner and is always eager to take on new challenges as well as voicing SME issues to help them grow.