What is Social Media?

Social Media is an umbrella term for online activities that combine technology and social interaction.  Social media isn’t media in the traditional sense, these new media channels are platforms for interaction and networking.  Social media is the platforms for online conversation and relationships. 

A hallmark of social media is user generated content.  Social media channels include internet forums, blogs, microblogs such as Twitter, networking sites such as LinkedIn or Facebook, email, instant messaging, shared content hosts such as Flickr and YouTube, as well as virtual worlds such as Second Life.  But social media not just a selection of platforms, social media is a conversation.  Social media bonds networks of people with a digital medium enabling them to interact with the content and share it with their friends. 


What does this mean for the modern company?

The impact of social media on public relations and advertising is fundamentally changing the profession.  Companies can no longer dictate their brand.  A brand is now defined as the sum of all conversations taking place amongst users, regardless of if the company voice is in on the conversation.  Brand messages are now personally interpreted, shared, and discussed between friends and people with common interests.  We have already seen companies affecting their public reputation by engaging in the conversation.

And the effect on online marketing is profound.  Social Media Marketing is the act of using social influencers, social media channels, and online communities for marketing, publication relations, and customer service.  This allows you to promote yourself while gaining valuable insight on public opinion about your company through the ways in which your customers express their opinions, needs, ideas, and complaints.  But users of social media are sensitive to their channels being hijacked for commercial purposes.  It isn’t that the users don’t want to be targeted and marketed to – it’s that they don’t want to feel like a conduit for someone else’s message or ideas. 

Now is the time to advertise in a non-traditional way. 
Now is the time to look after the reputation of your brand online.


How can Matraxis help you?

Firstly, we can help you join the conversation. 
Our experienced consultants will show you how to engage in social media platforms and harness public opinion. Whether you need assistance setting up accounts or a roadmap for an integrated marketing campaign, we can help you every step of the way. 

Once you’re engaged, we can analyse the conversation.
By finding where your brand and industry appears in social media channels, you can measure what's important to your customers, what questions they’re asking about your industry, and what events are having the biggest impact on your brand.  When users of social media share their opinion, they show who they are, and how they think.  By keeping track of the conversations in social bookmarks, comments, followers, downloads, opinions, votes and links; you can adapt in real time.

Matraxis is focused on building a complete monitoring and analysis solution for PR and advertising professionals so they can be the experts in social media.  This is more than just collecting information; you'll be able to drill down into the data to segment and sort any conversation to multiple levels of granularity, instantly.  Email and IM alerts will even let you know when a new post surfaces so you can engage immediately, pass it along, or follow up later.

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