Future of Social Media
From FORwiki
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Social media has exploded as a category of online discourse where people create content, share it, bookmark it and network at a prodigious rate. Examples include Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Twitter and JISC listservs on the academic side. Because of its ease of use, speed and reach, social media is fast changing the public discourse in society and setting trends and agendas in topics that range from the environment and politics to technology and the entertainment industry.
Two years ago, social media was the future. Now, according to research by Nielsen, social networks and blogs are the top online destination for the world’s internet users, accounting for the majority of time spent online. Social media is more popular than email.
The definition of social media is built on three key elements: content, communities and Web 2.0. First, content refers to user created content which may be of very different types; it may be photos, pictures or videos, but also presence information, tags, reviews and play-lists, to mention some examples. Second, social media is based on communities and social interaction among users. Social media applications typically enable communication either directly – which has been common on the internet since early days – or via media objects. This was made possible during the last eight years when digital cameras and video cameras, camera phones and broadband connections became widely available. The development of digital technologies for content creation and sharing, together with web technologies and applications that let people easily participate on the internet, is the third corner stone. These technologies have usually been packed under the umbrella term web 2.0 (O’Reilly, 2005). Sometimes, this term is used to refer to the whole phenomenon of social media, but here it is used it to summarise the technical aspect.
As a functional definition, social media refers to the interaction of people and also to creating, sharing, exchanging and commenting contents in virtual communities and networks. Thus, social media is literally user-driven activity, where the boundaries between producer and consumer are blurred. According to Pascu et al. (2008, p. 39), there are at least three dimensions defining the role of the users: users are suppliers of content, users support the distribution of content and service, and users have critical roles in the selection and filtering of relevant content and services.
Public relations specialists were some of the first people to embrace the power of social media, and as a result they are often the ones leading the way in the social space, whether they are consulting with clients from an agency point of view or strategizing on an in-house PR team.
In the past decade, the Internet has had a huge impact on how PR professionals function. As of late, social media is changing the face of PR, as well. We interviewed 14 PR pros on the future of public relations and how they see social media changing the industry. We collected their thoughts on how social media will affect the future of the press release, the evolution of social platforms, current limitations and solutions for those impediments, connecting with other PR pros, cost savings, and building relationships.
References
Toni Ahlqvist, Asta Ba ̈ck, Sirkka Heinonen and Minna Halonen - "Road-mapping the societal transformation potential of social media"
Sitaram Asur & Bernardo A. Huberman - Social Computing Lab - HP Labs - "Predicting the Future With Social Media"
http://www.marketingmag.com.au/blogs/the-future-of-social-media-8392/
http://mashable.com/2010/08/16/pr-social-media-future/
http://www.businessinsider.com/future-of-social-media-2011-11