From Facebook to Twitter to YouTube, retailers and food chains plan to use social media this holiday season to get their brands in front of consumers and possibly win a bigger piece of their limited shopping budgets.
-- Reuters
We all saw this coming. Even if you rarely use social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc you had to have seen this coming. It seems you can't go a day without these words coming into one conversation or another. And if you thought advertising in the past was too intrusive, you better get ready because it's a whole new ballgame.
Society wants unfiltered, direct contact with each other and the sites mentioned above have for now fulfilled our craving. However, these sites can be used by anyone and if you're business savvy you knew it would only be a matter of time before they were infiltrated by companies looking to expand their consumer base.
So remember how I mentioned these sites create direct, unfiltered contact? Well guess what? That means companies now have these benefits when trying to reach you, the consumer. So what does that mean? Well it's too early to discuss if it will be productive, but it's not too early to discuss how it will affect us. In fact, there already concrete examples. On Youtube, there are now commercials on user-generated videos. On Facebook, companies are allowing users to become "fans". And if you thought Twitter was safe, guess again. There is no denying these sites will allow for incredible brand exposure, but there is one question? Will users who primarily use these sites for social discourse even acknowledge the companies? As of now you'd have to say for the most part these companies are being ignored. For instance, the Wal-Mart fan page I linked to earlier only has around 5,500 fans--you could hardly call that productive. Only time will tell if companies will be successful in their social media endevours.
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