Social media has become one of the greatest forces in business today. People are more connected and discuss their experiences now on a daily basis no matter where they live.
Just a few years ago we were limited to writing letters or placing phone calls to keep in touch with people. That was maybe a once a month to a few times a year that this occurred. Come on, admit it, you did not call grandma or your hometown friends nearly as often as you should have. Then came email. That invention enabled people to easily send communications to others anywhere in the world quickly and cheaply. But as with letters and phone calls, this is a one to one communication. You send the letter / email or phone call to single person. That still does not allow for keeping in touch with many people very easy. Then came social media. It has broken that one to one communication relationship and allows you to connect and communicate with many people (hundreds and even thousands in some cases) as easily and quickly as you can communicate with a single person.
This ease of communication impacts business in several ways. People can say something good or bad about a company or product and the number of people that could potentially receive that information is exponential. People tend to trust the things said by people they know. So this communication can be very good for a company or very bad depending on what was said. Also, companies can communicate and interact with their customers more than ever. This enables companies to better judge what their customers want and listen for problems they are having.
In my research of social media for my graduate studies, I read the book Socialnomics. It is a wonderful discussion of how social media has evolved and what that means for business. It illustrates how it can be positive for companies that embrace and learn to use it. But also how the companies that ignore it or do not learn to use it properly could find their demise as a result. It was an entertaining and very informative read. I highly recommend it to anyone that is interested in social media, but it is a must read for people in business or thinking of going into business. You can find out more about the book here http://socialnomics.net/the-book/.