Well, it didn’t just start overnight and it’s not going away anytime soon.
I moved to the Netherlands in late 1989. Upon getting settled in Amsterdam one of the very first things I did was to ride a late night train to Berlin. Together with a group of college students and backpackers standing alongside Berliners and in the midst of military and police, I wielded a sledge hammer and broke off massive chunks of the Berlin Wall. I still have pieces of it in my office today.
The Soviet Union crumbled, East and West German reunified, the maps of central and eastern Europe were rewritten daily. The countries of the European Union opened up their borders to one another. The whole world changed. Then it happened.
First twenty four hour news, and then the Internet arrived. Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML) became the native language of the World Wide Web (WWW). Internet Service Providers (ISP), domains, hosts and serving computers came into place. Websites were born. Email was introduced and has quickly become the largest form of communication ever known.
Suddenly information traveled faster and to more people than ever before in history. A world that was starved for information now had access to it. A new Information Era had emerged.
We’ve now grown from Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), Usenet newsgroups and Internet relay chat (IRC) to websites, online forums, instant messaging (IM) and blogs to social networking, communities and micro blogs. LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are busily active and growing rapidly.
People today not only have access to information, they respond and contribute to it. The days where it was possible to tell people what to think, what to do and what to buy has passed away into the night. They (We) are no longer willing to have marketing and advertising pushed at them and business done to them. What people want is to have a voice and to be a part of the conversation.
Today’s tools for social media provide a means to engage one another and are the hottest innovations in internet marketing since search. Trends indicate this medium is poised for continued and exponential growth for years to come.
Let’s face it, social media is not a question of “if”, but rather of “when” you will get involved.
Social media is an integral part of life today. Let’s get onboard and see where it takes us. Better still, let’s join in the conversation, even lead in it, and a have a say so in creating the future ourselves.
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