Social Media Revolution

I joined Orkut in 2006, to be li'l more specific February, 2006. By the time I joined Facebook it was 2009, and in these three years bebo, twitter and bharatstudent (in india) has already taken the world by storm. MySpace , Digg , hi5 e.t.c were already there from 2003/2004, but wasn't really popular amongst Indian Students (at least may group). There are many others who have stepped into the bandwagon, some seeing success some still searching for it. Social Networking, the concept as popularized by Orkut and Facebook worldwide, seems to have moved cities and states into the virtual world. We are in the age of Social Media Revolution, and it is coming up strongly. With a strong sense of bonding and opportunity to keep in touch these sites offer a lot of services apparently for free to the normal user, in turn building up a cult of followers which can be and in cases is a potential market for advertising and product endorsements.

Social Media refers to the explosion of data and information disseminated everyday though the social networking sites. It allows a brand to get closer to people by the people, penetrate our lives.The only advertisement strategy that both produces sales as well as builds up a strong loyal customer base is till now Word Of Mouth  and these sites have started to use / exploit it lately. There is a potential market hidden and it requires patience and skills to tap it without destroying the ecosystem.

To look into the statistics, Orkut has got around 50% users from Brazil and around 18% users from India and it has around 30 million users! Facebook has 250 million, Digg has around 240 million visitors, twitter has above 5 million regular users (twitter ranking by Alexa is 13[todays figure]) similar figures follow for hi5, bharatstudent and others. Since these sites people to be the guide, say in making friends, often people find old or new friends on these sites (with a different approach in case of twitter) sometimes they tend to be localized in terms of craze or hype. But nevertheless they present a perfect platform for a range of things, say a product launch, affiliate marketing, events tracking, audio and visual entertainment (allowing users to subscribe to say a YouTube channel ... advertising or selling music maybe?), word of mouth propaganda and lastly most of them allow formation of communities which safeguard to some extent loyalty of a customer.

This is a Image search result for Social media Revolution, that summarizes it all (thanks Florian Lainez) :

Though on pen and paper it looks mushy to the novice, the scenario in reality is a bit twisted. Being on Internet was never going to be easy and safe, as on the highways. Hence a number of plagues cripple the systems almost regularly, starting with spams(in any form, scraps in Orkut, tweets by bots e.t.c), worms, viruses and unsolicited friend requests. Orkut has been plagued by FrandShippers, facebook being attacked by koobface e.t.c. There has been lots of controversies regarding these sites and facilities that they provide, as these are exploitable in a wrong manner as in any other form of science(nuclear energy was not to be made into atom bombs). Nevertheless Social Media has evolved over the years from being a closed group of networks to a open world, where developers of these sites have started sharing API's for better integration of a site to another, or your own site, thereby increasing reach, coverage and better interaction between the consumer and the merchandiser.

The real potential of these sites are the fact that people who have once been in one social network would remain there or move into another, but social network !

To have a better look at the revolution this is a must watch video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhPgUcjGQAw