My E-marketing (Comm 464) course has proven to be an extremely informative and face-paced course so far this semester. I’ve learned all about social media, funnels, talking, listening, and the power of blending offline and online marketing – to name a few. Once these fundamentals are well understood, a bigger picture starts to appear. For example, Paul Adam’s excellent slide show, The Real Life Social Network, looks ahead to the future of e-marketing, providing a few simple concepts that will change the way you look at social on the web.
My favourite concept from the slide show is a simple picture of how we form social relationships online versus offline.
The picture on the left depicts the typical offline, real life relationships that the average person has. There could be a bucket of friends from college, a bucket of friends from your hometown, and a bucket of family members; most of whom would typically not interact between your buckets. In online social relationships, on the other hand, all of your friends are thrown into the same bucket on sites like Facebook. This means that content posted by you that may have been intended for your college party friends only is seen by everyone (including your family, eek!).
It’s hard to say exactly what social media 2.0 will look like, but Paul Adam’s slideshow has me imagining the future social media experience more closely mirroring our much more complicated, real life social experience.