Monologue Has Given Way to Dialog

Like never before, the manner in which we communicate is in a state of change. The Internet has boomed, busted, and re-emerged with technologies and practices that are enabling new conversations that can start locally, and have a global impact. This fundamental shift has created a new landscape of influencers and an entirely new ecosystem for supporting the socialization of information.

Monologue has given way to dialog and in this new social media era, consumers are in control. With the injection of social media tools, every individual has the ability to eliminate professional media or corporate filters and utilize their networks to influence change, educate, unite, fight, or even sway an election. Social media tools allow players, protagonists, pundits and publics to interact, engage, and build rapport more easily than ever before.

The internet is now infinitely scalable. Text, photos, audio and video are available to everyone. The Internet is now the world’s most powerful publishing and broadcasting platform and is growing exponentially.

The idea of social media’s role as a listening tool and feedback mechanism is prominent and there is no shortage of social media tools for one-way or posted communications, such as blogs, podcasting, utterz, twitter, and wikis. Testaments to its effectiveness are prevalent; most notably the instance where a student helped free himself from an Egyptian jail with a one-word blog post from his cell phone.

Businesses see the value of connecting and sharing information, but because social media is user driven and yet unproven on a large scale, the tools and terms of engagement are still unclear. There’s still an uncomfortable uncertainty that accompanies giving employees and customers room to have their say online. Although blog posts and other online content are readily available to millions online, there’s still a misplaced insular attitude regarding information sharing to a potentially global audience and the list of fired employees on the grounds of inappropriate communication continues to grow.

More than flat or posting platforms, a social media application for business purposes must solve a critical business problem and seamlessly integrate with the regular workload, facilitating effective communications around a project or work process. The current social media options that work so well for consumers are too fragmented and slow for company use.

For an organization to participate in social media activities they can, for example, blog, comment on other people’s blogs (and track them through co.mments), contribute to crowd-sourced news aggregators like reddit, Digg, or Fark, create profiles on social or professional networking sites like LinkedIn, MySpace, or Facebook, participate in microblogs like Twitter or Jaiku, post events in social calendars such as eventful.com and upcoming.org, become an avatar in a virtual world like Second Life or There, participate in communities or forums like a Yahoo group, a Google group, or start their own using Ning….or they can engage in business to business conversations on Apeer.


Monologue Has Given Way to Dialog - To learn more about this author, visit Patti D. Hill's Website.

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