In the past 10 years we have reached new heights in social media's creativity and interaction. And now, thanks to hugely popular crowdsourcing sites, collaborative interaction toward shared success will move social media forward.
Think back—further than what you may realize—to social media's beginnings. In 1994, Geocities, the first web-based interactive platform, was created. Around that time, the term "social media" was coined by Tina Sharkey, chairman and global president of BabyCenter LLC and a former executive at iVillage and AOL, or Darrell Berry, a writer, photographer and self-described "social media researcher and strategist."
Since then, the concept of social media evolved. Now, social media is as an environment in which people can share information and ideas and create new things through collaborative interaction in a vast array of virtual communities. It wasn't always like that. It's only been in the past 10 years that we've come close to approaching the powerfully creative engine social media promises to be.
Consider sites that demonstrate the power of the crowd. Check out Quirky.com, a crowd-based invention community where people submit ideas for great new products and the Quirky community votes on whether to move production forward. If the idea is liked, the community kicks in with pricing, design, marketing concepts and final product naming. Everyone who participated in the development shares the profits; Quirky markets and sells the product online and all involved can profit.
Why should you share your profits with so many people? It only costs $10 to submit an idea. Without this platform, many of these products would never see the light of day. An invention's traditional path from concept to reality is much too expensive and cumbersome to take on for anything but a very big idea.
Or take a look at the many crowd funding websites that help raise money for all sorts of projects. Kickstarter.com states that it has raised $869 million and funded 51,630 projects. That represents about a 44% success rate against the roughly 122,000 projects launched.
Indiegogo.com is similar to Kickstarter, but allows project funding for charities or other causes. I'm partial to Indiegogo because a movie in which my son has a role, "Two-Bit Waltz," began its funding process there.
Two sides of social media
For years I've cautioned that social media for businesses is not the place to "sell" your products and services. When you create a presence on Facebook or Twitter, LinkedIn or Pinterest, your customers or prospects don't "like" or follow you to find out about your products or to buy what you sell. Your customers or prospects want to find out about you and what you stand for.
The purpose of being on social media is generally to educate, to become a resource for your market before they ever meet you or need your products or services. This is where you can bring your business brand to life and position yourself as a reliable expert in an area, freely offering information without asking anything in return.
Social media becomes the conduit through which you become known, liked and trusted—the three critical elements for building a strong, long-lasting relationship with your customers. But that's not all it is.
Instead of asking yourself, "How can I best use social media?" ask "What are our strategic business objectives and how can social media get us there?"
Each type of social media platform offers something different to users. Facebook is about socializing around activities and lifestyle, allowing people to share photos and videos; Pinterest allows you to curate things you like and share those galleries or "boards"; and Twitter is about real-time, short updates about what's happening now and, in some instances, sharing those perspectives on trending hashtags.
In most of those cases, social media's goal is not to market your business but to bring forth ideas—points of view and valuable information that help reinforce and define your company's brand. A significant difference comes into play when you start looking at a platform like LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is one environment geared specifically to support networking for business. The structure of displaying not just your first-degree connections but second and third degrees as well clearly demonstrates how you can grow your network just by asking to connect, with very little effort.
Network marketers all over the world ask a powerful question that can open doors to a wide array of possible business relationships that grow your business: "Who do you know?" Referrals are some of the best customers you'll find and all it takes is asking the question.
So what LinkedIn and other social media platforms support is nothing new; business professionals have been asking who you know for years. But now, technology is the conduit and the Internet the canvas against which the question is asked.
Don't forget that the strengthened relationships you're building with your social media presence allows you to ask "who do you know" to a much broader group of contacts than you ever could in the real world.
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