>Social networking is probably the most significant business development of 21st Century.
During the year, social networking morphed from a personal communications tool for young people into a new vehicle that business leaders are using to transform communications with their employees and customers, as it shifts from one-way transmission of information to two-way interaction.
A year ago, many people poked fun at Facebook as a place where kids shared their latest party news. Today more than 600 million users worldwide are active on the site. The most rapidly growing demographic is people over forty. More than 300 million people spend at least one hour a day on Facebook. Approximately two hundred million people are active on Twitter in spite of – or because of – its 140-character limitation. Another 100 million use LinkedIn. None of these social networks even existed at the beginning of the decade.
Many top leaders are active social network users. Why? Because these social networks are a unique way of broadly communicating real-time messages to the audiences they want to reach. They can write a message anywhere, anytime, and share it with interested parties without any public relations meddling, speech writers, airplane travel, canned videos, or voicemail messages. Now their words are much more authentic and can be remarkably empowering.
More and more companies are also realizing that social media can be a powerful crisis management tool:
The biggest threat presented by social networks is that the power has shifted to the customer who can, if dissatisfied with the business, impact the business and brand very publically. Alone this year there have been some major attacks:
In fact, brands who take on board the criticisms they hear on Facebook, Twitter or through social media monitoring, and then try to improve on them, will be the ones who continue to grow and prosper. Every single piece of information that is picked up online, be it good or bad, is a valuable learning.
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Pratik Patel (B.D.M.)
Shreeji Ceramic Ind.
Morbi – INDIA
Shreeji Ceramic 