Social Media Marketing (Ebook)

The challenges facing global businesses and the people who lead them are now, more than ever, intertwined in the direct empowerment and involvement of customers and stakeholders. The World Wide Web—
described by Sir Tim Berners-Lee as “an interactive sea of shared knowledge…made of the things we and our friends have seen, heard,
believe or have figured out”—has dramatically accelerated the shift to consumer-driven markets. For millennia, power has rested with those resources: first with land, then capital, and most recently, information.


In a socially connected marketplace, shared knowledge is now emerging as the ultimate resource. Information wants to be free, and in these new markets it is: free of constraints on place, free of control on content, and free of restrictive access on consumption. Social technologies, on a mass scale, connect people in ways that facilitate sharing information, thereby reducing the opportunities for marketplace exploitation—whether by charging more than a competing supplier for otherwise identical goods and services or charging anything at all for products that simply don’t work.

The Social Web exposes the good, the bad, and the ugly, simultaneously raising up what works and putting down what doesn’t without regard for the interests of any specific party.