Al Segars, one of the nation’s leading business consultants and a member of the faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill, encourages entrepreneurs to look beyond successful new products or services for underlying trends that made these products or services succeed. Identifying basic economic, technical and social trends is the secret to revealing competitive growth opportunities, he says.
And, so it is with social media. In Segars’ view, Twitter is a form of mobile instant messaging that is a strong supplement to e-mail. Will Twitter be the only one in this space forever? Of course not. Can an organization create its own mobile instant messaging for customers and prospective customers? Absolutely.
The broader trend behind Facebook is the emergence of relationship databases that allows for entry, sorting, aggregating, interacting and searching within billions of details on millions of individuals. Will Facebook be the only company to capitalize on relationship databases? Don’t count on it. Could an organization create its own relationship database to attract and cultivate new customers? Of course.
The critical need facing all organizations active on the Internet and within the social media space is to reach out to supporters and cultivate them into “fans” through useful information, products and services. The gathering and management of this type of information is one of the greatest needs of most companies, but all of this is changing through Web site registrations, print and broadcast advertising, news media coverage, point-of-sale information capture and through links with social sites such as Facebook.
Social media is illuminating several trends that can be vitally important to marketers – the ability to customize messages right down to the individual, database management for millions of potential stakeholders and, most importantly, two-way, real time action, reaction and adjustment.
Successful marketers in the future will be those who can master the use of existing social media outlets, while plumbing the rich technology and societal evolution surrounding new technology. These will be the organizations looking over the next horizon and becoming the true leaders.
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