Image at blaugh.com
In many previous postings I have been pondering on the importance of Social Media for business and how it will change our cooperation. Today I would like to discuss our dependence on such technologies:
I still remember the days in the mid-80’s when email addresses were written with exclamation marks and you had to know the path through the servers for the mail to arrive. E-mail was a “nice to have” gadget and nobody entrusted important information to it. All the “real” company and external information came per paper mail.
These days passed more quickly than I anticipated. It was in the late 90’s when a pharmaceutical company in my town had to send the employees home after an email outage. It had taken a mere 10 years for email to become an indispensable business tool.
If Facebook or Twitter would be down today there might not be a big stir in the business community except for the guys from the marketing department but in a few years a Social Media outage could very well bring business to a grinding halt.
Certainly if a blog site would go down we would feel the pain. Maybe not immediately but after a day or two. A Twitter outage could very well lead to more severe withdrawal symptoms.
TechCrunch recently pointed to a nice parody video on YouTube called The Social Network 2 – If Zuckerberg Deleted Facebook Parody Trailer. It is worth watching.
Sometimes we feel already depraved if we have to turn off our devices during a presentation. Enjoy the video “Gotta Share!”
What do you think? Which Social Media Apps could you not live without?
Related articles
- The Social Network 2 – If Zuckerberg Deleted Facebook Parody Trailer (techcrunch.com — quoted above)
- Could You Live Without Social Networks? (DannyBrown.me)
- Why People Can’t Live Without Social Media (ContentCustoms Blog)
- Imagining College Life Without Social Media (US News)
- How to Back Up Your Social Media Accounts (ponderingtechnology)
- Could your inbox soon be permanently empty ? (talesfromthelou.wordpress.com)
- Twitter, There’s Nothing Wrong With Being A Social Network – TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)
- Aus Papier, Leder und Metall: Account von sozialem Netzwerk aus den 90ern gefunden (Der-Postillon.com)
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HellmuthBroda.com (Pondering Technology) 
Companies making intensive use of social medias, e.g. as part of their marketing or recruitment strategy, should include this in their overall risk management policy. As wisely suggested in your post, what would happen if Facebook or Linkedin would disappear from the net, what would be the costs for those corporations having built up specific social media strategies. Any of these, based on the use of a 3rd party service, should always anticipate the risks related to a failure of this 3rd party; this means also to be able to valuate the added-value of social medias.
Michel, thanks for this. I could not agree more!
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