Social media is crowd sourced advertising

The rate at which technology is changing and, thus acting so many facets of life is simply amazing. Just look at the mobile phone revolution that has completely turned around the way we communicate, interact, socialise, do business, name it.The changes continue. Take a look at the emergence of social media platforms. From the days of Hi5 and MySpace to Facebook and Twitter, so much has been transformed.Those involved in advertising and public relations have had to adjust to this new reality. The era of traditional advertising is long gone. The architects of Google saw this coming. At the time Viacom was a big media company, eating up a huge chunk of the advertising revenue, Google was just a search engine. Today Google is an advertising giant besides being a search engine.So, do not underestimate the potential of new technologies and platforms.Many people in business still look at social media platforms like Facebook as places where young people share photos and waste time. What many do not realise is that these platforms are actually great avenues for advertising and public relations. They still prefer to use traditional media like radio, TV and newspapers to run ads and ignore where people are ‘hanging out’ lately.What social media offers, which you cannot get from traditional media, is that it helps you to market with people instead of just advertising to them. With social media you advertise and then people help you spread the message.In short, you are crowd-sourcing the marketing role to an infinite number of people ‘out there’ over an infinite period of time. Compare this to traditional media, where the audience numbers are not that flexible and the time is already set to a day in the newspaper or a few seconds in the electronic media.All you need is ideas and content that is catchy to compel audiences to share, like, recommend, pin and retweet as many times as possible. This way, you have people singing praises for your brand without you having to pay them.The days of ignoring new advertising platforms are for the laggards not the smart business person, who is willing to move with the times. Companies need to get their brands onto Facebook, Google+ or Twitter as early as yesterday.