Social Networking

We all are familiar with social media and social networking. Most of us even feel that we know most of the uses that these social media platforms offer and the advantages that they bring to a business or a person. Most of us have heard about a case when through social networking a business has increased their revenues at little to no cost. Like the case that was discussed in my marketing class last semester about a restaurant that opened in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The owners decided to bring the restaurant to twitter, foursquare and yelp. But not only that, they listened to what people were writing and they were actually acting upon those comments. Even sometimes the customers will give a recipe for a burger and the restaurant will actually use it and sell it. As you can imagine this boosted the revenues of the restaurant tremendously. 

Other organizations that are benefiting from social networking are involved in politics. Political campaigns are now publishing heavily on social media in order to attract support from all the social media users. This has been proved to be very effective, mostly because the people seeing the post by a politician can actually comment and give their opinions in real time. One of the first examples of this change is the Obama's campaign. When the president used social media in order to strengthen his campaign. In the article "How Obama Tapped Into Social Network's Power" by David Carr. We get a description of how the president was one of the first politicians to take use of the "unconventional" and non traditional social media for his political campaign. The use of Facebook and twitter to run a campaign ended up giving more power to the people and to the president himself; the ones loosing here were the bankers and lobbyists, as Mr. Carr said: 

   

           "The juxtaposition of a networked, open-source campaign and a historically imperial office will have profound implications and raise significant questions. Special-interest groups and lobbyists will now contend with an environment of transparency and a president who owes them nothing. The news media will now contend with an administration that can take its case directly to its base without even booking time on the networks."

Just as these social media platforms become more popular and powerful; they become more competitive with each other. Social media platforms are in a constant fight in order to grab more users and it seems that they all want to take over the other. Some social media platforms have not survived the competition from Facebook and Twitter (like Myspace). But even when we think that these two giants are very different from each other, they are actually very competitive. This is better illustrated in the article "Facebook Goes for Some Twitter Sensibility" by Claire Cain Miller. On this article, Miller explains how after failing to acquire Twitter; Facebook decided that it was time to imitate some of the features that seemed very useful by the Twitter users. One of these features that Facebook took from Twitter is the option to tag a friend in a status update. Before, the option to tag friends was limited only to pictures. Another thing they took was pretty much the whole Twitter layout in what is called "Facebook Lite". Search, and see for yourself; I hope you are okay with copycats.