Social Media - Is it Social?

Recently a friend of mine here in Japan invited me to join Empire Avenue. For those of you who don't know what Empire Avenue is let me see if I can explain it although I must admit I'm not 100% sure myself.

Empire Avenue is basically game in that other players buy and sell shares in you. At the beginning I thought that your online activity on sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ allowed you to get a higher price on your share price. I thought that this was directly related meaning if you tweeted then you price would go up. This is not true. The more social media activity you do the the more desirable your profile then people will more likely buy your shares and then your share price goes up. Confused? It took me about a month to work this out. I'm not confident I've got the whole idea but I suppose the whole idea of anything new is to dive in and work it all out later. If you study and study it you will never do anything and you might as well have done something else with your time.

Thanks to Empire Avenue I have started a Twitter account, I'm a lot more active on Facebook than I used to be in that I "like" a lot more, I try to post and share things and just generally use the site a lot more. A friend of mine introduced me to Hoot Suite which has helped me with Tweets. I'm sure if I tweeted manually I wouldn't tweet at all.

Social media is certainly here and here to stay. People are using it as a marketing tool or as a way to keep in touch with family and friends and you would think that with many people using Facebook and the other sites that everyone is happy with it but like other things there are always detractors and I met one of them yesterday. I have just spent a week with a couple of women and then I asked if I could connect with them on Facebook. They were both negative about Facebook in that one said she likes to keep he life separate meaning family, friends, work are all separate. Fair enough. the other woman thought that Facebook was not social at all and that was to the detriment of society as a whole because we hide behind our computers and don't get out and actually meet people. I can see her point there and I agree but social media does have it's place so the following are five reasons why I like social media and more specifically, Facebook.

1. It is easy to catch up with old friends and also keep in touch with family, especially cousins who may not be in your generation.

2. Information can be shared very easily. After the Tohoku earthquake in 2011, Facebook was an essential part of people's lives as information was sent back and forth.

3. It can be used for both social reasons and business reasons and in fact some larger business businesses actually have departments in which someone's job is to look after the social media of the business.

4. Even though you may never get to meet with the person face to face, it gives you an opportunity to connect with people from all around the world and get their perspective on life.

5. In terms of Twitter it allows you to have in one place a base to hear from people that you might admire or idolize and you can even interact with them by asking questions. We know with some famous people their security doesn't even let you near them.

Social Media is social if you use it to supplement your "off-line" life. When you start to find yourself sitting at a computer for 15 hours a day then you might have a problem when you go out into the wide world.

There you go. As I said before, social media is here to stay. All I want to know is, what is it going to be like in 10 years time. That will be interesting.