The Origins and Direction of SMO and SMM

One of the latest catch phrases being bantered around the interwebs today is collective consciousness. This immediately conjures up images of the Borg stoically going about their business whilst maintaining a constant chatter with the rest of the collective.

But this idea has been around since the dawn of time in many forms such as religions and memes. Richard Dawkins suggests that aside from language and the use of tools, the meme is responsible for the comparatively explosive evolution of the human brain. In terms of the internet, we are now seeing social networking sites spread like wildfire for the simple reason that the idea of being accepted and finding your niche in society is not nearly as narcissistic as it initially appears. In fact its probably more natural to our psychology than love or hate. The whole reason for the internet was so that DARPA could communicate effectively over great distances at speed. This idea was thought up at the beginning of the 60's and by the end of that decade the first messages were being sent through ARPANET.

At first the idea was considered pretty absurd but within 30 years this had gone from a project that was exclusively military in nature to something that connected the globe in a way we had never seen before. Suddenly there were message boards and forums like The WELL where people could talk about idea's, exchange information and find common ground with like minded people regardless of geography. This evolved into IRC ( internet relay chat) where people could talk to one another in channels or in private. This is where the whole idea of sharing files such as pictures and music really started to take off. I think Geocities was one of the first websites to turn this format over from direct communication with people to pasting a page on the web for all to see. It was a lot easier sending people a web address over IRC than sending the same file to different people. Then later the two ideas were incorporated and one of the nicer functions I find today is that of the return of the thread in social networking sites like facebook.

I think the world started to see the value of social networking sites when in July 2005 The News Corporation acquired Myspace for the modest sum of $580 million soon followed by ITV's doomed acquisition of Friends Reunited for $208million. Even though The News Corporation paid roughly $26.85 per user and ITV paid roughly $13.86 per user, ITV still ended up selling Friends Reunited four years later at a loss of almost £100million. Why is this? Is it possibly because the value of a social networking site can *gasp* not be measured by the sum of it's users. Fickle users who will jump from one site to the next solely depending on what they can do with it and how quickly they can do it. I think News Corp. got lucky, they got in there first with the first site that really took off. But then again, the success of this acquisition remains to be seen.

Regardless of how much old media want to gamble their precious pennys actually purchasing these behemoths, the shifting markets of social media can be monitored, can be exploited and can be advertised on to great effect. It doesn't matter that if myspace says it has 26million users and there are actually only 13million active account holders, this is still a significant amount of traffic. Much more importantly, specific traffic by people who are freely invited to tell the world about their likes and dislikes, their wishes and hopes and the images about themselves they want others to see. In essence this is probably the greatest advertising resource of all time. No longer are blanket ads necessary. If your product or service has the ability to appear to people who are either discussing your brand or talking about a competitor the advantages are... ( well there's quite simply nothing better yet ) an advertisers dream.

Since Web2.0 and all the new options that presented for designers, we have most certainly not seen the apex of the social network. Social media optimisation and marketing will therefore become as comparable in necessity as SEO ( search engine optimisation ) was to Web1.0. However where SEO had a list of rules that defined how your page was perceived by search engines, SMM and SMO are closer to public relations in their function but on a far more focussed level. There are even bloggers at the moment attempting to outline the essential tenets of social media marketing. Much like a cocktail party they say, there are minute social rules that must be applied least you alienate more contacts than you end up attracting.