The golden age of social media

“Once a decade, a new technology emerges that completely disrupts the business landscape,” Clara Shih, a social media expert, said.

“In the 1970s this was mainframe computing; in the '80s it was the PC; last decade it was the internet. This decade it is online social networking, the world wide web of people, a big map of who everyone is and how we are connected together – the ramifications are vast.”

Facebook has epitomized the golden era of the personalized Web. Though not a pioneer in the field, it has truly championed the social media movement to the masses.

As the central figure in the field of major social media players that includes micro-blogging site Twitter, video-sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo, photo-sharing sites like Flickr and Photobucket, blogs like WordPress and Blogger, audio-sharing sites like Last.fm and imeem and business social networking sites such as LinkedIn, social media is shaping our world politically, culturally, in business and beyond.

Starting with bloggers like angryasianman who ranted, among other things, about the way Asian-Americans faced discrimination in mainstream media by being overlooked or depicted in stereotypes, this demographic of young Asian-Americans is now using social media to empower themselves.

In 2004, a trio of young Chinese-American college students, now known as Wong Fu Productions, became a YouTube sensation when videos they produced to share with friends became immensely popular among young Asian-Americans.

Wong Fu opened the floodgates for Asian-American YouTube comedians like KevJumba (Kevin Wu), Nigahiga (Ryan Higa) and HappySlip (Christine Gambito) who are now pulling a lion’s share of millions of viewers away from mainstream media with videos they produced.

Much has been said about how social media was used in the recent elections in the United States, but in the high-tech economies of Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, social media has become embraced equally, if not in more sophisticated ways than in America.

In Singapore, due to the dearth of political viewpoints in the tightly-controlled mainstream media, political blogs have a history of influencing many young Singaporeans on what it really means to live in a democratic society.

While social networking sites used to be a bane in the office environment, businesses are seeing the vast gold mine it offers in terms of marketing.

Because of the way social networking sites effectively capture demographics according to their interests, Clara Shih, who created the first business Facebook application, Faceconnector, describes in her book “The Facebook Era” how businesses can capitalize on social media to micro-market to customers.

Perhaps one example of such direct marketing in social media is alivenotdead.com, a social networking site base in Hong Kong that allows artists to connect directly with fans and keep them updated about upcoming concerts, promotional tours and interesting news about their lives.

Through Web sites such as Twitter, which offers real-time information about news issues, social media is becoming a powerful component paving the way for statisticians, scientists and researchers to mine incredible amounts of behavioral information and eventually be able to make adaptive social forecasts.

The ramifications, as Shih says, are indeed vast. Much is yet to be uncovered about the way social media will further affect the societies.