Taking Social Media Seriously

The term "Social Media" could be stereotyped by some as "Posting pictures of your cat on Facebook".  But it's so much more than that.  

- Fact: Your business now has a 1 degree of separation from the most influential people in the world.  So the way I see it, if you can make a huge impression and engineer the engagement, then you're in the door.

- Social Media is not just entertainment.  It's the basis of all communication as we know it.  And it's constantly evolving.

- Attention has become the most valued resource, because there are now hundreds of millions of people who can rapidly produce high quality content.  The content to attention ratio is skewing exponentially, further compounded by previously accumulated content.  The amount of web pages (including all forms of media) has got to be in the hundreds of trillions by now (if you include every page that historically got traffic, on every popular website).

- People are improving with their techniques on all social networks.  Therefore, those will always get saturated, and new ones will emerge.

- Because of the point above, i predict that the Long Tail content model is going to suffer from continuous dilution going forward.   The Hot Trend content model will be superior, but is obviously more competitive than ever before, as everyone is jumping on the bandwagon.

- Social media is the best way to get attention: on your brand, on yourself, on your message.   This is because everybody has a phone in their pocket that is tied to every social network effortlessly.  You can now produce videos right on your phone, then throw them onto 10 platforms, all in half an hour.  If your video is truly special, you will reach millions of people.

- We are seeing multiple versions emerge of how communication between people and businesses should work.  And we are just getting started.

- Social media is changing people's habits and lifestyles.  It's disrupting consumer behavior in ways that are hard to analyze.  This is because, each person is a unique snowflake, and the number of use cases is extremely high, to be able to analyze reliably.