September 3, 2012 assignment

In chapter three of Design to Thrive, by Tharon Howard, different reasons as to why companies should build social networks and communities are discussed.  I found this section to be interesting because when I was reading the list on reasons I noticed that I recognize those characteristics from sites that I visit. For example, “providing a higher quality interaction with your organization” and “identifying customer needs and new product opportunities” are both things that I am aware of. 

Considering the reason “providing a higher quality interaction with your organization,” to me, this means that through a social network or community a company, who is ‘higher’ than the public, can come down to their level and better understand and communicate with them to get to know their hopes and wants for the community. Through interacting on a social network, the company seems more personable and less authoritative. When reading the point “identifying customer needs and new product opportunities,” I think of times when I am online and there are places you can write your opinions about a companies product and they will ‘reward’ you with something or if you ‘like’ their Facebook page, when the company post new products and you share them, the company gives you opportunities to win things, which makes their new product spread faster.

In Secrets of Social Media Marketing, Gillin discusses in the first few paragraphs a day in the life of Greg Peverill-Conti, a public relation professional, and briefly compares that to a life of someone who worked in public relations a few years ago.  This was a really interesting part to me because though I know that there has been an extremely dramatic change in media over the years, it is actually interesting to sit down and think about it.  Routinely, public relations professionals get paid to scan and rescan social media sites for new news because it, most often, hits those sites before other sites. I found it interesting that there are websites and search engines that are devoted to only sorting through blogs or Twitter. I thought the fact that was listed on page 42 about Google was incredible. It indexes so much when I think about it, but in reality, the fact says it only documents 20%.