PERHAPS social media is called such because it is available for use by everybody, meaning anybody that has access to the social networking sites in the internet.
In actual practice however, the term seems to fall short of its implied meaning, because these sites are mostly used now for “sosyalan”, rather than for meaningful social change. That is understandable however, because that is the original purpose of social networking, for people to socialize, whether there is a purpose or not.
Sooner or later however, the more meaningful purposes should emerge.
The buzz word in social networking nowadays is to “engage” the members of an online community towards a purpose; it does not matter whether the purpose is profound or trivial. The focus is really more in the process, meaning the process of acquiring members, organizing them and engaging them to do something.
Perhaps it could be said that for as long as people join web sites and for as long as they start to join online groups, something good is bound to come out of it, no matter what rhyme or reason eventually comes out.
Because of tight competition online, many social sites have been forced to define and refine their market positioning, and this trend has led them to go after specific niche markets. That is the reason why Friendster has decided to be a gaming site, Multiply has decided to be an ecommerce site, and Linked In has decided to be a professional directory site.
Of course there are many other ecommerce sites that are strictly for buying and selling, but these are not technically considered as social networking sites as the name usually implies.
Here in the Philippines, we have seen two recent examples of how social networking sites could be used for social change and these examples came out of Facebook, right now the biggest of such sites.
The first example is the advocacy against “epal”, street slang for politicians who are using public funds and public places to promote themselves, obviously to drum up awareness for themselves in their desire to gain more votes.
The term is derived from an inverted spelling of “papel” a contraction of the vernacular term “pumapapel”, meaning the act of drawing attention to their personas. After the campaign against “epal” politicians went practically viral in Facebook, many of them decided to remove their signs and posters that showed their self-promotion campaigns.
The second example is the advocacy against the passing of the cybercrime law, indeed a very hot issue that struck into the heart of the online community. The advocacy also went practically viral in Facebook, and as a result, our lawmakers blinked. It could be said that many local politicians blinked when the anti-epal advocacy heated up online, but when the lawmakers blinked because of the advocacy against the cybercrime law, it was perhaps the first time in our history that national politicians also blinked, thus showing the power of social sites.
What happened in the advocacy against the bogus party lists (bopal) was seemingly a reverse trend, because there was no real campaign in the internet. Instead, there appeared to be a deafening silence among the members of the online community, not objecting but neither agreeing.
Groupjump, a new social networking site has entered the online market, and it practically combines Facebook, Multiply and Linked In, meaning to say that it also has ecommerce and professional directory features. Unlike Facebook however, membership in Groupjump starts by being invited to a group by a designated group administrator, and only those who are invited could become members. Engagement is the main operative word in Groupjump, because it is designed to enable group administrators to engage their members so that they could be active in whatever purpose the group is intended for, whether it is for advocacy or business.
More than a decade after the ecommerce law was passed, the majority of local business has yet to discover online marketing, much less use it to grow their business. In what appears to be a sharp study of contrast, brick and mortar stores cost more to open and yet these could only target small markets, while online stores would cost less to open, sometimes for free, and yet it enables owners to target bigger markets. Using an extreme example, online stores could even offer one product only, but that does not matter, because they would have many markets to tap anyway.
Engagement is an ideal supplement to ecommerce sites, because it would enable store owners to have a built-in customer relations management (CRM) module. The data resulting from CRM would also enable online store owners to have a built-in know your customer (KYC) component, a feature that is very important nowadays because the more they would know their customers; the better they could service them. My own take on this is that KYC is very much suited for Filipinos, because we are good with personal relationships./PN
