In a post earlier this week, we looked at the business implications of social media. Your consumers are now Web 2.0 natives, instinctively sharing their views about your products and services with each other. Listen in to learn to serve them better, but more importantly, be part of their conversations.
But I know many people are either skeptical about social media like blogs and Twitter — or they don’t really understand them. The good news is that social media guru Clay Shirky has just done a talk for TED on the subject. It’s brilliant. Click here to go to the page.
Because he starts slow — explaining exactly how social media has emerged from the days before the internet — it’s the kind of video even your granny would be able to follow. He then explains how technology gets really embedded into our societies when it gets boring. We stop thinking of it as something clever and new and just use it to share and communicate.
That leads him onto the implications for organisations — be they governments, companies or communities. The bottom line, he concludes, is that these communication technologies and the social networks they power are now global, ubiquitous and cheap. In other words, they’re unstoppable. Ignore them or react to them badly at your peril.
(Pic: Steve Punter cc2.0)
