IF THE NEWS IS IMPORTANT, IT WILL FIND ME…..This line defines the new power shift in the field of communication and trust on Social Media platforms. Here in this article I am trying to investigate what makes it so adoptable, how it explore human psychology and why companies needs to tab this before it’s too late.
Aspect of Adoptability Social media continues to have a tremendous impact on how people behave online; how they search, play, converse, form communities, build and maintain relationships; and how they create, tag, modify and share content across any number of sites and devices. In response to the ever-increasing penetration rate of social media services and the fierce competition among new entrants and incumbents, new business models emerge regularly, where firms blend unique technologies and business models to build competitive. At the same time, content-sharing sites, microblogs, social networks, wikis and a plethora of other consumer-oriented services and platforms continue to grow. Adoptability of social platform continue to grow rapidly as the comfort level, need for presence, digital relationship, reputation, group ego and feeling of expressing self identity increases among people.
HONEYCOMB MODEL
This honeycomb model helps explain the implications that each block can have for how firms should engage with social media in three important ways.
- Different specific facets of the social media user experience.
- Allows managers to conduct a focused a priori study of their firms’ specific ‘community needs
- Lens for monitoring how dynamic changes of the community’s needs vis-à-vis changes of the social media tools present implications for the firm.
Exploring The Psychology
The shift in paradigm of social power has already happened; new beliefs have redefined the way power is perceived. The stronger social network you have the more powerful you are perceived socially. Your views/opinions/judgments all become more important to others, if you belong to this elite group. This shift in power has been made possible largely as a result of rapid developments in social networking sites. The key change brought about by this has been from “visiting” to “participating” and forming communities in the on-line world.
The availability of “wiki” applications has led to the creation of consumer-created content, which is disseminated via blogs, reviews, user groups, forums and other social networks. One intuitive hypothesis is that “popular” people (those with vast, far-reaching, and significant networks or contacts) will have connections both in the real as well as in the virtual world; thus the number of people one deals with in the real or physical world should be positively correlated with the number of virtual or electronic contacts one has. On the other hand, a less intuitive (but still feasible) hypothesis may be that people who are less popular or charismatic in the real world may somehow “compensate” for their lack of charm by over-indulging in virtual social networking sites (and, unsurprisingly, spend more time in the virtual world than in the real world). Whichever is the case Social Media has strengthened itself to all kind of people.
Social Media puts the “public” into PR and the “market” into marketing.
The evolution of Social Media has brought tremendous opportunities for companies; the differentiation that has to be ensured before exploring social media platformsis to be strategies. It depends on the nature of business, target audience and AIOs (Activity, interest and opinion) of target audience on different Social Media platforms. Above mentioned Honeycomb Model and study of target audience psychology can be a huge help for the companies.
Determining what customer wants is essential for any company, and trend spotting has become a multi-billion dollar business. However, it is becoming tougher. In today’s high-speed digital age, information and ideas spread at rates never before imagined, and, as a result, customer wants and needs have an unprecedented turnaround time. Companies only hope of keeping up is to join the Internet age.
Whatever the method of dialogue, it is clear that customers will increasingly make their views known, to each other or to companies, as the technology to do so become easier to use and those companies who can listen and engage will reap the benefit which others can only dream of.
Reference:
Special Issue Paper: Unpacking the social media phenomenon
By: Jan H. Kietzmann, Bruno S. Silvestre, Ian P. McCarthy and Leyland Pitt