BlogSocial Media and Web 2.0 are, let's say, a revolution on a cultural approach for the web and the evolution of the forums, BBS and others Web 1.0. mediums already existed. Of course nothing could be done without the assistance of technology and a fundamental key that many IT companies agreed upon. To have a common language for information distribution and exchange.
What's the usage of it? How it works as a model?
We will better describe it with an example. Have you ever dropped a pebble or a rock in a lake? If No, then run and do it. You will understand immediately what we describe here. If Yes, you have noticed those concentric circles spreading from the point the rock fell.
This is the first level of social. The information gets out and published. It gets out of the website/forum/blog, etc. But it goes to many directions. This spreading can occur with RSS export of news and articles of a website or by submitting articles through the website to other channels, like Newsvine, Digg, Stumbleupon, Prweb, Facebook and more. Yet, this is distribution.
The second level can be the re-distribution of information through various ways:
- People can comment on your press release published in, i.e. Newsvine, and the whole article with comments can be re-submitted to their Delicious account where others can see it.
- From the article a person can get a paragraph of interest and blog about it in his blog mentioning your article url which eventually leads to your full article in your corporate site, ecommerce shop, lifestyle magazine, etc.
- So people, as long as they find the article useful to them or others, will circulate it.
And this can go on and on. So, your link is shared around, you can add video to your article and these to be distributed separate. The video can be implemented in YouTube, so there is another crowd there where you can target them.
Can you get the bigger picture? If so, imagine what happens to these concentric circles when they hit each other. Don't they multiply to more groups of circles? And so forth and so on...
This is called theRipple Effect in Social Media.
How difficult is it to implement such logic in our strategy?
Actually it needs some quality work to design the strategy. Plus to have a primary medium (usually your website) developed in a way that supports and promotes social bookmarking actions. But the most promising and resultfull thing is to get committed to it and stick to the strategy. This will get the results in a good level.
We can help in both. Brands tend to adopt social solutions where no basic research has been done. Thus, many brands create a Facebook group or page and they expect people to flock in. This does not happen as people need a reason to gather around
one thing. But we can talk from close for these.
