Social Media

The book I read to research this post was The Social Media MBA  by Christer Holloman which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. I think this book is edited by Christer rather than written and features social media specialists from 4 continents who look at social media from an international perspective. In the west obviously Facebook & Twitter are extremely popular and the former often vies for most popular site in the world with Google. Half of all Facebook members log in and check their account in any given day. There are other very popular social media sites in other parts of the world. In Hong Kong for example there is a very successful bulletin board site at http://discuss.com.hk & in Japan there is a very popular social media called CyWorld. Two Chinese social media sites which are even more popular than Twitter are Baidu & QQ. The latter being the top micro-blogging site in the world. Many companies are encouraging employees to use social media to promote the company they work for. Some are trying to only have a specialist social media department promote them but they are gradually realizing they can be missing out on potential business. Some companies are very concerned about branding and if any employees do promote them they have to follow very strict policies with in that branding. Other companies are less strict and feel that having a more open policy is better. I think in most companies managers do find social media is a major component of their job even if they have a secretary that handles a lot of it. There are specialist social media marketing courses at most colleges in Britain. Some businesses like Dell have turned their business around with the help of social media. They have exclusive offers to followers on Twitter.  In addition they have upgraded their quality of their computers considerably and at one time their computers tended to use onboard graphics which has mostly been remedied. There are over 25,000 comments and discussions about Dell Computers on social media sites every day and they have a team that monitors this and tries to see if any of the suggestions can be applied to improving their business. I did quite enjoy reading this book and I may join some of the social networks mentioned. One thing I've noticed is a lot of web browsers translate foreign language and Google Chrome does a particularly good job of this.