ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews past social media developments, examines current social media practices, and offers future projections regarding the role of social media in marketing theory and practice. In the process, it provides a comprehensive understanding of social media in all its facets. It also offers conceptual frameworks of past and present social media developments and practices, which include, among others, various applications, such as virtual game worlds; content communities, such as YouTube and other photo and video sharing communities; user generated content such as blogs and micro-blogs; digital video; social networking communities, such as Facebook; virtual worlds, such as Second Life, and virtual goods; ratings and reviews and other word-of-mouth communities; collaborative projects, such as Wikipedia; and mobile social media, among others. Subsequently, it is projected that the future social media technology will increasingly result from virtually endless interactions of company/company generated content and user/user generated content. Competition and information clutter is also projected to increase substantially in the future. Therefore the companies will have to tap into the lucrative social media platforms in order to effectively market to target consumers.
The chapter will also address overall opportunities and challenges of social media including the inevitable life cycle scenarios where online social media as we know it will lose its potency and experience the fatigue and ineffective resonance we now observe in the case of telemarketing and other older media vehicles. In these scenarios, social media may lose its power and even its significance — already, consumers are defecting from social media communities where they perceive an overwhelming brand and/or company presence, or even at the mere possibility that domain owners might attempt to monetize their website. These scenarios make it very evident that true innovations rather than mere tweaking of technologies is necessary for success and survival of social media in the future.
