With great social media power comes great social responsibility

1969 was famous for many reasons. Right from the Bryan Adams song that pervaded pop culture for many decades to the landing of the Apollo 11 mission on the moon. 1969 witnessed Woodstock and the flight of the first 747 jumbo jet. Amidst all of these significant milestones in human history, there was a small step that was taken that would eventually change the course of human history. On an ordinary Wednesday, the 29^th of October in 1969, at about 10:30 PM, Charley Kline attempted to send a message from one host computer to another host computer. The first message that was ever transmitted on the internet was “lo”, a truncated version of “login”, which was supposed to be the original message.

It was not until the dawn of the new millennium that social media took birth. In 2002, Friendster, the first ever true social networking site was created. It gained 3 million followers in just the first few months. Google then attempted to buy the company for 30 million dollars the next year. They were promptly refused. In 2004, MySpace overtook Friendster in terms of popularity and in the same year, Facebook was born. In just two years’ time Friendster lost most of its users to Myspace and their valuation dropped to just 1 million dollars! After starting off as an internal Harvard University website, it slowly began to evolve into a social networking website. It was not until 2006 when Facebook opened itself to everyone who is 13 years of age and above and had a valid email address. In just about 4 years, Facebook was evaluated at 41 billion dollars becoming the third largest American web company behind Google and Amazon. As of today, the company is valued at a whopping one trillion dollars.

How did social media become such a ubiquitous part of our lives in just 8 years? Facebook now has over 2.2 billion active users. That means that 1 in 3 people in the world is an active user of Facebook. For marketers, this is the holy grail. A platform that would enable you access to a third of the population of the world. It is what marketing dreams are made of. Or is it actually?

Facebook and Social media are evolving at a tremendous pace and it is getting tougher to predict how they would be impacting our lives. Who would have ever thought that you could game elections and change the course of history by sitting in Lithuania and using Facebook. If the initial findings of the investigations into the American elections of 2016 are anything to go by, then a team of Russian teen hackers sitting out of Lithuania gamed the elections and rigged it in favour of Trump. The evolution of Social Media has given rise to a new term called Social Engineering. Thus, marketers have now found a way to game human behavior using the internet.

With this great power comes great responsibility. And how brands and organisations use this power that is there at their fingertips will determine the future of Social media and humanity. We have not yet fully grasped the power of this medium and the extent to which it can be used to exploit. In the following series of blogs, we shall explore as to how we can use this medium as brands to increase awareness and remain relevant to our core audiences. We shall learn and understand how to gain a following and how to groom your audience. Stay tuned for more 😊