Social media: the beginning of a new era?

I just finished reading “Facebook Era” by Clara Shih. While I would consider myself relatively knowledgeable when it comes to social media, this book opened my eyes to a lot of things I hadn’t even heard of before.

One thing I never really thought about with the advent of social media is the universality of the trend. Shih’s book is great about giving a history of social media and explaining the uses and audience for the most popular networking sites and applications.

Something else that really stuck out to me was her explanation that, while social media is criticized for taking away personal connection, it actually allows us to communicate more. Shih discusses “fringe” relationships and explains that social networking sites let us keep in touch much easier than ever before. We can connect with people we’ve only met once or twice, or maybe even never at all, with very little effort.

The most valuable lesson I took away from the book was that social media in all forms is not for everyone or every business. Shih gives awesome advice on how to figure out a social media model that works best for your company or simply the brand Y-O-U.

Twitterviews and other social media

This is seriously insane. I'm sitting in my dorm room in little ol' Athens, Ohio, and I'm watching George Stephanopoulos interview John McCain live on Twitter. I can't believe how far technology has come just since I've been alive.

I remember being 3 years old and playing computer games on our Apple desktop complete with floppy discs. When I was in 6th grade I learned PowerPoint and Excel, and in 8th grade I made my first website.

I think I was 12 when I first got an Instant Messenger account, and I thought it was the coolest thing. I got an email account around the same time and it made me feel so grown up! Now with Facebook, Myspace and Twitter, e-mail and IM are almost outdated.

Social media allows instant communication but on a different level than email or IM ever could. It's seriously amazing that I can get updates from my professor, best friend and Ellen Degeneres all at the same time.

My dad always tells me that it's all about networking, and as I start to understand the importance of that, social media is making it so much easier to connect with professionals than it was even ten years ago.

I'm intrigued to see what will be the "next big thing" in social media, but for now I still have a lot of catching up to do on all of it that already exists.