I've waved the white flag and thrown in the towel. I am now a social media convert. It may be the primary domain of the twenty-something's, but you can't deny the pervasive creep of all things social media into our everyday personal and business lives. So the million dollar question is, how can social media help grow a small (or mid-sized) business? Since most SMB organizations are too busy worrying about their day-to-day business operations, I will attempt to shed some light on the history of social media as well as some of the most commonly used tools and technologies.
The earliest social networking platform was born in the late 1980s from AOL (America Online) chat rooms. Users were able to network and connect with others from virtually anywhere an Internet connection was available. Chat rooms created a new social dynamic, and for several years, this was pretty much what passed for social media. AOL then found ways to embed advertising into the application, and thus created a new revenue stream. This was just the beginning of the social network explosion.
Even with the crumbling of the dot com industry in the late 1990s and early 2000s the desire to connect to the Internet didn't wane, it only grew stronger. The next prominent milestone in the social media timeline was the introduction of web logs or blogs. These tools enabled Individuals and/or organizations to post information on just about anything. Mini-websites such as Blogger and Wordpress allowed these posts to be accessible to anyone with an Internet connection and they gave the reader a chance to interact with the author by leaving comments.
The earliest social networking platform was born in the late 1980s from AOL (America Online) chat rooms. Users were able to network and connect with others from virtually anywhere an Internet connection was available. Chat rooms created a new social dynamic, and for several years, this was pretty much what passed for social media. AOL then found ways to embed advertising into the application, and thus created a new revenue stream. This was just the beginning of the social network explosion.
Even with the crumbling of the dot com industry in the late 1990s and early 2000s the desire to connect to the Internet didn't wane, it only grew stronger. The next prominent milestone in the social media timeline was the introduction of web logs or blogs. These tools enabled Individuals and/or organizations to post information on just about anything. Mini-websites such as Blogger and Wordpress allowed these posts to be accessible to anyone with an Internet connection and they gave the reader a chance to interact with the author by leaving comments.