Читать книгу The Checklist Book: Twitter Edition - A.J. Hammond Lapre - Страница 5

So you – the bold, smart, savvy entrepreneur – want to dive into the world of social media or, if you like, social networking. Good for you! But have you ever taken a step back to understand exactly what social media is or what it can – or can’t – do?

If you already know, then press on to chapter two. If not, here is a very brief description of social media. Drum roll, please:

Social media is:

1. A way to communicate

2. A way to promote things while talking about stuff online.

The first point may seem obvious, but is important. Online, a person can type a few sentences on Twitter, Facebook or other website about how his or her day went, hit the “ok” button and, instantly, his or her friends, family and foes can read this update. This individual can also add a photo of their lunch and, as example, include a link to a funny online video of a chef trying to cook a meal.

With social media, then, people can magnify their thoughts. Instead of calling friends one at a time to catch up, today we can now potentially inform thousands of people all at once pretty much anything we want, include videos and images.

The second part is less obvious. Back in the “good old days” – before the Internet really began to take off – only the huge, powerful media networks had the capability to reach thousands or millions of people at one time, most typically through TV, radio and print advertising. And how did most of these media companies make money? From advertisers. You sit down, watch your favorite program and inevitably you also end up watching a number of ads along the way.

With social media, the new “program” is reading about your friends, family and colleagues and the ads (at least for Twitter) come in the form of various, random “tweets” that may carry a link to the latest hot viral video produced by a company or a hash tag (#) with a brand name. Twitter has also added what it calls Promoted Tweets, which are similar to ads. (We’ll explain more in Chapter 3.)

There are plenty of resources if you want to know more about the miracle of social media, but in the most basic of nutshells, this is what makes social media so different than other forms of communication. For our purposes, we will now focus on Twitter in the context of public relations. But, keep in mind, social media continues to change and evolve and the average online user will be exposed to more branding communications, not less.