Social Media & Security, Yesterday & Today

• by Dan Bailey

When people ask what I do, and I mention I teach Social Media Marketing and SEO at GSU, the invariable response is, “How can you keep up; it must change daily!” And interestingly, this very response belies my view that the common problem with social media marketing today is a focus on tactical changing features and technologies instead of more long-term strategies and primary marketing objectives. Older models, such as wheel-and-spoke models and Chris Anderson’s “Long Tail Theory” are still extremely important to digital marketing and social media.

But let’s get back to the hairy details of the changing face of social media… I recently stumbled upon a two year-old blog post of mine on social media security issues, “Advertising and Security in the Semantic Web”. Fascinating thing is, the consumer concerns and digital channel progressions toward security concerns are the same today as then – that post is as relevant now as it was two years ago! Facebook and Google are still scaring the masses with their inclinations toward “consumer privacy”. MySpace, covered in the article, is far less on peoples’ radars, but the point is this is definitely that which we assumed could not be – a long-term trend in social media! And I don’t expect it to go away anytime soon – as has been repeated by writings on digital media today, Google and Facebook know more about us than the government – and not even the government has successfully contained them. Whether we like it or not, our consumer behavior has birthed these behemoths and enabled their paths towards future growth on the individual data level.

So check with me in two years – I may rewrite my blog post rewrite all over again – because sometimes the digital issues that change daily don’t change.

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Jake Aull | Marketing Strategy | Social Media & SEO | Digital & Creative
email | zenofbrand.com | @jakeaull | jakeaull.wordpress.com