ABSTRACT
Looking back now, in an age where Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube dominate our daily lives so much, it hardly seems possible that, little more than a decade ago, most people didn’t have their own online presence or would consider using their social media voice to hold companies to account. Back at the turn of the 21st century, though, the emergence of blogs and then social networks caught the business world by surprise – shifting the power of publishing and broadcasting from major corporations into the hands of the public. This chapter recounts the rise of social media and how it shocked a corporate world that had become accustomed to controlling its messages through mass advertising and marketing, and had lost touch with customers in the process. It looks at how the roots of social media grew from the early days of the Internet and how big business came to embrace this disruptive medium only to co-opt its power for more mass marketing.
