Week 3 - Microsegmentation & Social Media

List

Origins of Social Media
Long Tail Podcast
Evan Williams - Twitter @Charlie Rose
When Social Media Became the News
Razorfish SM Report
Seven Segment System for Marketing
Point of Twitter podcast @NPR

Questions
What is Microsegmentation?
What are the benefits/drawbacks of it?
How does it relate to Social Media?
What is the Long Tail?
What is Razorfish?

The emergence of online shopping and review tools, chief among those Amazon and Zappos, has lead to an increased rate of microsegmentation. This growing marketing approach is helping companies better leverage the phenomenon of the Long Tail, or "selling less of more". Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine sparked the use of this phrase to describe the increasing percentage of sales attributed to low volume purchases of a large variety of items - often niche products. As this trend continues, the tail on the power curve of sales stretches longer and longer.

There are a few apparent trends surfacing among the media we've consumed week to week -
1) Shift from a supply to a demand driven market - [From this week: Twitter & the growing Long Tail are drivers of this]
2) Social media has an impact on ecommerce - [From this week: Increases "bubble up" of the top ideas" and can reduce the prevalence of a Long Tail; reduced social pressure on niche items can increase the rate of negative feedback on these products]
3) Don't dismiss or overemphasize ANYTHING [From this week: refers to the Long Tail, but this seems to hold true for ALL technology etc. that seems out of reach...wait a year, it may become a reality!]

Social media is continuously developing and in many ways, reinventing itself. On Charlie Rose, Twitter is described as the new way to communicate that we didn't know we needed. As a member new to Twitter in the past 6 months, I couldn't agree more. It is through increased familiarity with the tool and the media I've absorbed in this course that I have been able to cultivate a better online style and presence.

Evan Williams comments that there is so much more potential to synthesize and leverage collective intelligence through crowdsourcing and/or algorithms. As this social media tool grows this functionality envisioned by Williams and expands its user base, it will bring even greater change to the marketing frontier and nature of online communication than we've seen to date. Twitter provides a voice to those who did not have one. In emergency situations, such as the tsunamis and plane crashes, social media enables individuals to share and personalize these events through their first-hand experiences. Currently, this is evident in the wake of the Gulf oil spill. 3rd party applications like TwitPic and yfrog enable users to share photos and videos of oil and animal victims as part of the rising party of amateur journalists. CNN also launched a feature, iReport, specifically designed to leverage readers' input - primarily photos and videos.

Social media has come a long way - even pushing the evolution of traditional marketing and production into microsegmentation - but there's so much more yet to come.