I was thrilled to see the new release of Yahoo! Buzz go live (finally). Having such a huge player offering a news-voting experience to its members could prove itself to be a giant leap in opening the Web 2.0 to all, really ALL.
Forrester recently published a research paper concluding that social applications will thrive in a recession. Ironically, this could be social media’s finest hour! You would have expected “new media” to be shelved in favor of “good ol’ media”, wouldn’t you? Well, Josh Bernoff and his team isolated the factors which they believe make going social a winning strategy.
I took the liberty of summing up two points from the paper, along with my own thoughts:
1. It’s not about awareness, it’s about engagement. Getting people to know you exist is not enough. You need to engage with them and build up a conversation. The great thing about social media is that the conversation goes all ways: if you both talk to your audience and listen to your audience, they will also talk and listen to each other - about you! Why does this matter? It matters because in hard times, consumers are less open to outside messages. But, they remain open to messages from their peers.
2. It’s cost-effective and it’s measurable. With the right strategy social media campaigns can give you an exponential return. With the right metrics and tools to track them, it’ll be easy to see the results. This makes social media the one piece of your marketing budget you really need to stick to.
It is in times of financial uncertainty and belt-tightening that tough choices are made. These choices will undoubtedly shape the form of the media markets in the years to come.
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