Social Media has taken a slight curve out of its original purpose. By definition, social media started out to be a network between ordinary people from anywhere around the world. A chance to bring globalization to the next level. Long distance relationships can take place, whether it’s long distanced family, romantic bondings, you name it. It wasn’t long though before companies saw the true gold behind the concept: segmentation exploded up into a pedestal.
Simple segmentation like demographics, geography or even psycho-graphic concepts have been torn down and penetrated all the way to segmentation by interest. As a company, you no longer need to spend millions of dollars in market research just to find out who would possibly be interested in your product. All you need do now is enter certain characteristics on Google, Facebook etc as far as people should have in order to be a target for you, and voila! You have a target just after pressing a few keys.
YouTube started out to be a platform to post and share video filmed or recorded by ordinary people. Now every major company in the world has an exclusive YouTube channel. Most of the recommendations from the homepage are related to a product or a service: movies, music, award ceremonies, you name it. Some authors are even complaining about the situation. See this story on YouTube’s turn on events http://thenextweb.com/google/2011/02/21/when-will-google-put-the-you-back-in-youtube/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+TheNextWeb+(The+Next+Web+All+Stories)
You want to be searched for without any other results that might be familiar to you? Just hash-tag yourself on Twitter and millions of people, even if they are not your followers will find your brand. Named by “The Next Web” as the Power of the Hash-Tag (http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/02/21/the-power-of-hashtag-5-use-cases/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+TheNextWeb+(The+Next+Web+All+Stories)) companies and brands would be crazy not to take advantage of the 4 free lines that will make your brand available to anyone around the world after the press of the Enter Key. This search is so much more refined than Google’s. Competitors can come out in the search, where as with a Hash-tag, you get rid of all the unwanted company.
Who would have known? Now, more than just pop-ups (not missing them) media has reached you not because they want to spam you, but because you want to find them.