When I first came upon Twitter, the one thing I immediately felt was that this was one social media platform that would perhaps not suffer from spamming. I was proved wrong almost instantaneously by mysterious followers on Twitter whose accounts were later suspended for ‘suspicious activity’.
The relevance of social media depends entirely on how we use it and thus, in the process, help shape its evolution. Abuse of social media in the form of spam or crassly commercial messages/presence/information will not help anyone, of course. But I am counting on the very nature of social media to ward off the ill-mannered among us and grow in spite of them.
Currently, a lot of social media sounds like noise: everyone busy talking at once, and very few listening. But that’s because we’re all still so excited about it. We’ll settle in our seats eventually and have our audiences, provided we have something to say.
Social media is here to stay and that, believe me, is good news. It’s changing the way people work and communicate, for one, and the way businesses are presenting themselves to their consumers. I see them lending more than an ear to what their consumers are saying, partly out of fear of rejection, partly out of the urge to belong in the consumer’s life.
Social media has also meant that everyone’s got to be on their toes. When a multi-national ice cream company announced on a signboard at the airport that only holders of international passports would be allowed inside, it got furiously blogged and tweeted against. The resulting outrage was strong enough to get the company to retract its message without a whimper.
So, the movers and shakers of things can’t afford to react to things the way they did in the pre-Twitter, pre-Facebook days. The rules of the game have changed, and quite irreversibly so.
From today on, Blue Pencil India will offer a weekly round-up and analysis on how social media is changing our world, particularly the way we communicate and seek information. The social media scene in India will, of course, get special mention.
You can also send in your views/articles about social media, and we’ll be glad to publish them with some editing, as required. Even if it’s just a comment, would love to hear from you!
