Here at XPLAIN we love Social Media. But what is Social Media? Social Media are the Media of People, the Media your potential customers use but most important create.

Facebook and Twitter are good examples. In reality they have no value at all as sites. The only valuable asset they have is the millions of users and the way they communicate / interact with each other.

Let’s see what Wikipedia says about Social Media.
“Social media are media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media supports the human need for social interaction, using Internet- and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM).”

Every site, every blog, every on line community is a Social Media if it helps people communicate, interact, state and receive feedback for their opinion.

When I was working as an editor for a computer magazine I was troubled every time a user was asking his “online friends” (on the magazine’s site) if a product is good enough for him to buy when at the same time we had a big test in those products. He trusted more the opinion of someone called “diabolic” than the magazine’s even though that he probably never met him. Why;

The easy answer is that information on the Internet is free. He didn’t have to pay something to get it. But how the review from “diabolic” had more value than the one published in the magazine and how can someone trust the review from a guy that, in most cases, goes online with a nickname?

Then I realized that even I was doing the same thing if I wanted to buy something other than computers. I was trying to find someone else (an online or even an offline friend) that had done this before me to ask him his opinion.

Every user at the Internet had the same power with me as a journalist. He could publish his own opinion-review and he could reach more people. His review was free and would always been published. Mine would “live” for a month, and someone would have to give money to read it.

I realized at the time that the problem is not the people. We as a media, or should I say the whole Mass Media Industry had the problem. People trust more their friends (it doesn’t really matter if they are online or offline) than the “mass content” created by the newspapers, magazines or TV. The matter of credibility is not an issue any more. If 300 hundred people say that something is good and 50 that it isn’t, then in most cases it is good enough.

With social media it is easy, simple and free. I can ask my 300 Facebook and my 400 Twitter friends for their opinion on something with one click. I can say something to them in a second. I can have my own blog now and potentially a few million readers. I now have the power.

People now have the power in a Social Media world and they love it!

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