Information
is a vital element in everyday-life communication. Social media has been able
to bring communication to absolutely new level significantly enhancing consumer
decision making process.
Living in the technology-driven
world, obtaining information digitally has become a fundamental part of the
decision-making process. Existence of smart phones has allowed making a
comparison, drawing a conclusion and undertaking a purchasing action with a
simple scan touch. Social media transformed barcode scanning application into
the ‘social scanning’ that helps users immediately get an access to the
relevant information regarding pricing and characteristics of the competing
products, and hence enabling them to make informed decisions and most
importantly share the knowledge with the others through social networking
distribution. This, in turn, allows businesses to measure consumers’ offline
behaviour and improve their customer knowledge.
With the growth of Internet and the
volume of information distributed, online search becomes extremely complex and
often time consuming process. Realizing that, social media players decided to
transform Internet search into intelligent information discovery. Online services
of questions and answers evolved into high-scale information based platforms
for accumulating knowledge in an organized way. Great examples are Quora,
Ask.com, Swingly and Google’s Aardvark, who aim at enhancing information
exchange through social interaction by providing socially relevant answers.
Social entertainment and location check-ins
are another trend in modern online communications. These social networking
services give opportunity to exchange information regarding peoples’ social activities
and thus, outline patterns of consumer lifestyles. Entertainment check-ins “enhance
the social experiences around television, and potentially inspire new audiences
to tune into trending or friend-approved television”. On the other hand location
based information services such as newly launched location check-in by Facebook
and Google Latitude give opportunity to track the places visited, count time
spent at each place and display information on statistics such as "Time At
Work", "Time Spent At Home" and "Time Spent Out".
Given importance of information in making
sense of the environment, an obvious fact is that the sphere of communication
has expanded dramatically. Social media age has unquestionably redefined the
way we obtain information.
Read the original article written by
Jennifer Van Grove on Mashable Social
Media
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