Social media is a newer word in our vocabulary. If you simply take the words at face value, all social media should be is a way to be social via media. Yet it is not that simple. Social media has changed how we find good and services, how we market to each other, how we give referrals. In the past if someone wanted to find a local business we would look in the yellow pages. It was easy enough to flip through the pages and find what we wanted.
The businesses with the biggest budget had the most exposure. They were the ones who could afford those full-page adds and they always caught our eye first, didn’t they?
I don’t think we could have imagined how that was all about to change. Every time I moved to a new area, the first thing I would do is look for the local yellow pages for the goods and services I would need to set up my new home.
Once people started using the internet to research things they wanted to purchase the yellow pages ended up on the same shelf encyclopedias sit on.
The first time it really hit me that encyclopedias and yellow pages were now relics of the past is was when I took my daughter and her classmates to the library to do research on science projects. I believe it was sometime in 1995. Most of the students in her class had computers at home and proclaimed the library to be full of old dead Data. A no man’s land of old oudatedness!! My daughter and her friends wanted the latest Info for their projects, not that old stuff in the library books!
I was momentarily stunned , and quickly realized we had passed into the Age of Aquarius which is all about air and ether and technology .The Information age. When we were singing that song years ago we had no idea what we were ushering in. If only we had known!!
Anyhow, my point, is that technology changed how we shop. It is reshaping everything for our children and our children’s children. Landline phones created a need for phone books . Our new smart phones have created the need for Apps instead. Not sure how to get somewhere? There’s an app for that. Want to check to local weather, there’s an app for that. I wonder what tomorrow will bring?
Personal computers made the information highway of the internet and cell phones and tablets brought us into still more new dimension. Now we actually have our first external electronic brain extension.
The current smart phone replaced our contact book, our camera and our date book. Our new cell phones can do many things a computer can including shop on line. In face, most of our smart phones of today are 100’s of times more powerful that computers of the 80’s and 90’s! And it skyrocketed the popularity of social media. No longer were we tethered to email in order to get updated on what everyone’s up to. Now we have Facebook, and before that My Space.
Instagram, Vine, YouTube and Mashable, all apps that allow those we care about, and some that we don’t, to share their lives with us instantaneously. All of which have begun to develop platforms for advertising. Purely social sites which have morphed into ways of promoting our businesses.
If you have a business and don’t have a social network adviser, a good web tech to keep your website running smoothly..well you’re on the virtual shelf where, the encyclopedias and the Phone books are.
Now that you’re up to date on the technology behind today’s forms of communications, perhaps you understand better the need for a navigator on the information highway. That’s what having a good web designer and social communicator does for you. We provide a direction for the flow of information to best serve your business as well as your customer.
Valentina Boonstra
Guest Blogger
Spread the word..
