How To Navigate the Social Media Landscape

With so many options for active engagement with potential consumers, customers and clients, it is important to understand each social network site (SNS) before a company begins engaging with its publics. The fabric of Web 2.0 is comprised of user-generated content and the interactivity of the medium. We're social creatures by nature, and the evolution of the World Wide Web reflects this interactive and dynamic process of interaction and the possibilities for the exchange of information cross-culturally.

You may hear your grandmother, boss, and your 15 year old talk about social media. But what is it really? Brennan and Schafer, in Branded! How Retailers Engage Consumers with Social Media and Mobility, offer this explanation of what social media is: it is an electronic media for social interaction. It makes use of Web 2.0's highly scalable and accessible publishing techniques to transform and broadcast media monologues into social-media dialogues. It supports democratization of knowledge and information and allows general users to go from being content consumers to content producers.

But even knowing what social media and SNS are doesn't help a business translate this definition into reaching potential consumers, and it certainly doesn't help achieve the bottom-line in business transactions and interactions. Below is a video interview conducted by Doug Stephens of Retail Prophet  explaining some of the things your business can do to see an increase in bottom-line satisfaction.