Interaction Marketing is Tomorrow’s Social Media

A Sign of What’s to Come

Have you taken a moment to look at today’s media landscape in order to forecast what is coming in the days ahead?

Right now we are on the brink of amazing technology that once unleashed, will change the way the world not only looks, but interacts with us.

In the past…media was a 1 way street. As an entrepreneur, your charge was to interrupt programming in order to catch a few seconds with your audience.

Today though, that doesn’t work very well, and coming soon, it won’t work at all.

People are moving too fast to pay attention to commercials and advertisements. The only way to catch them is within the context of their daily interaction. Right now, you can catch people on Twitter and Facebook, but soon, you will be able to catch them while they interact with their environment…when they aren’t in front of a computer screen.

I don’t know if there is a name for it yet, but I’ll call it “Interaction Marketing.”

What does this have to do with social media?

Good question, and I’m glad you brought it up.

Just as social media has now become less new media and more “media,” so too will this technology become commonplace.

The trick then, is to recognize new mediums as they come and be willing to test early and test often. Those companies that jumped in to the social media scene early have been able to sneak in and dominate markets that were once held by gatekeepers of old media.

Zappos is a great example. Although they sell shoes, their brand represents so much more.

The technology of tomorrow being used today

Soon, you’ll be able to embed information on nearly any object in the world, like you tag photos and videos on Facebook and YouTube, thanks to social databases and global connectivity.

I know it’s too early to call on technology like this, but if you take a minute to imagine what it would be like to live in a world where every machine recognizes your image, knows your name, and has a database of your preferences, then you can start to see how you or your company could use the ideas of tomorrow for business today.

You already have access to technology that allows you to learn about and understand your prospects and customers.

Using Facebook, you can create targeted ad campaigns based on demographics, interests, religion, group membership, marrital status, and almost any other search term that you can think of.

Using tools like LinkedIn, you can work your way through vast networks of people and their connections…seeing first order, 2nd order, and beyond.

With YouTube, you have the ability to use contextual advertising based on viewer patterns, you can create free advertising and make it cool and worth watching, and you can use annotations to keep people clicking through your channels.

Most people don’t even know about Flickr, but using their “people tagging” functionality, you can create a database within your database and use it to remember the people in your photos and to share that information with others.

Social media today is tomorrow’s unified social network. We’re building it now, and if you can’t see the potential already, then I don’t know what to tell you…because we’re just getting started.

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