Double-Edged Sword of Social Media

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Who has no Facebook account? If no, please quickly go and sign one up now- www.facebook.com!

It may not surprise you when I tell you my mum, my aunties, uncles and even my friends’ babies have Facebook account. But you may be surprised when someone blind also go on Facebook. Not only he has a Facebook account, he also has a handphone which he can text you anytime. And this blind but cheerful man,  my newly met friend,  is named Halim. Halim is a musician too. He plays piano in a Band called The Channel. He will be performing on my wedding day in 2 weeks time.

So not only the big corporatea like MPH, Coffee Beans, and many other merchants have Facebook account, now the blinds also register themselves with Facebook. Do you want to be left out?

Facebook is the fastest growing social medial online. They have 300+ million users at this very moment. Malaysia itself has 3.5million users at the time of writing. Please see the screen shot below for the Malaysia statistic from my monitor. For your information, the number of facebook users in Malaysia is growing at the rate of around 1500 per day! This is huge.

While Facebook is growing strong, there was report that Twitter is going downhill after Presidential Election in the States. Obviously the hike of Twitter usage was due to the well plan digital war from the team of President Obama. The American were following every move of Mr. Obama via Twitter at that time. According the eMarketer, the traffic of Twitter was down dramatically 27.8% from Sept to Oct 2009, within a mere 1 month.

Why so many people are using Facebook now? The straight forward answer is for Networking.  It is a place where you can share you news, your products, your views with your friends, your friends’ friends, your friends’ friends’ friends….  Let me give you a simple diagram presentation below:

For example, look at the very simple diagram showing the relationship of four Facebook community members:
I am in one Facebook group with Mr. B, and another, different, group with Mr. D. The nature of the Facebook community means, therefore, that all of their information will be freely passed to me, and, similarly, my information will be passed back to both of them.

Mr. B. also receives similar information from Ms. C, and inevitably some of that information will then be passed on to me. From there, it is reasonable to assume that the information will reach Mr. D and so on and so forth. This is a very simple example of the ‘social graph’ that Facebook see as being of fundamental importance to Facebook platform, which is effectively the latest version of the Facebook site and system.

So you now understand why so many big corporates are cutting down their advertising cost and instead opt for this Free social media solution. But, or course the set back for individual user is that, you are no longer hiding behind the wall. Anyone can have access to your profile, your LIFE and your family’s LIFE too. Isn’t that scary

Just recently a Canadian woman learned when an insurance company cut her health benefits, claiming she was healthy after seeing pictures of her smiling in bikini at the beach on FACEBOOK. So, no more hiding my friends. This is digital era. If the diagram I presented to you above trigger you on some business ideas on Facebook, please go ahead and implement it. Facebook is a good platform for business if you know how to do it. I will go into the Facebook advertising in the near future. Watch out for my post.