Social Media is a term that has been used way too much, yet way too few actually know what it means. Social Media is not a metaphor for Twitter, or even Facebook, it is a term that works best as a simile for community, as in ’social media is like one big stadium of music lovers’. Or ’social media is as powerful as seventy-five thousand friends talking about the same thing’. The best way to understand an orange is too peel it back and eat it, but social media isn’t that simple.

“Every great man has his day, and every horse he rides eventually breaks a leg” (in my community creatvity rules supreme), websites and communities come and go and some even bite the dust. Social media changes constantly, it evolves, it grows, and we flock between each of the new. It is always better to follow a symbiotic herd then try to boldly stand alone and shout-out loud for ‘anyone’ to hear. We are creatures of habits and companionship; and we constantly strive to find a place to build on this foundation. The social web is a collection of cliques to the millionth power, and only now are users beginning to understand that it’s better to have one central-located community, then trying to balance a sporadic collection of hundreds of the same small social forums.

The reason Twitter and Facebook work so well is simple, they set a stage for a person or group to meet and discover multitudes of others with similar lifestyles as their own (for free). They are communities where anyone can go, to learn about what they love, to teach others, to positively forward their personal lives on and off the internet.

Standard advertising is dead, (okay so maybe it’s not dead, and okay obviously it’s never going to die) but it is going to change bit by bit in the coming years. No longer will we be focused on creating billboard-style 2-D advertisements. Companies will start to understand the importance of social media in contrast to traditional banner flashing. The ads and brands of the future will revolve around communities and good products will bear the deserved fruit; Hence, the remaining insufficient others will be deemed ineffective and fade with time.